India is all set to become a leader in the software testing market with an increasing number of software development companies outsourcing their software testing work here. Industry analyst firm Gartner has pegged the worldwide software testing market at $13 billion and the global market for outsourced testing services to be around $6.1 billion, of which India is expected to corner a 70% share.
Software testing implies checking any IT system prior to implementation for multiple aspects like functionality, reliability, usability, security, compliance and performance. Market players like Hexaware and AppLabs believe that the need for outsourcing software testing has grown due to the high level of complexity and multiple intersection points in modern software.
“The winning combination of cost, communication, exposure to various domains, testing principles and test tools gives a clear edge to India in software testing,” said Hexaware Technologies global delivery head and chief software architect Ramanan RV. While software services are growing at an average of about 10-12% globally, testing is growing at over 50% every year. The market opportunity for Indian offshore testing companies is seen at around $8 billion by year-end, from $2-3 billion a year ago.
“Indian businesses have matured in terms of making IT central to all business processes. Hence, there is a very high level of business dependence on error-free software code,” said AppLabs president and CEO Makarand Teje.
A global case in point is eBay, which experienced a 22-hour outage of its website in 1999 due to software flaws. It cost eBay $5 million in revenue and an 11% drop in share price. The outage affected 1.2 million customers who were either trying to sell or buy something on the website.
Along with the growth witnessed in off shoring of software testing to India, the average deal size of such projects is also on the rise. A few years ago, the average deal size for an outsourced testing project was about $50,000-60,000, requiring a few testers. That has now grown to about $2-4 million per project.
According to Gartner, India will require around 18,000 testing professionals every year over the next three years to fulfill the demand seen in the software testing market.
Software testing implies checking any IT system prior to implementation for multiple aspects like functionality, reliability, usability, security, compliance and performance. Market players like Hexaware and AppLabs believe that the need for outsourcing software testing has grown due to the high level of complexity and multiple intersection points in modern software.
“The winning combination of cost, communication, exposure to various domains, testing principles and test tools gives a clear edge to India in software testing,” said Hexaware Technologies global delivery head and chief software architect Ramanan RV. While software services are growing at an average of about 10-12% globally, testing is growing at over 50% every year. The market opportunity for Indian offshore testing companies is seen at around $8 billion by year-end, from $2-3 billion a year ago.
“Indian businesses have matured in terms of making IT central to all business processes. Hence, there is a very high level of business dependence on error-free software code,” said AppLabs president and CEO Makarand Teje.
A global case in point is eBay, which experienced a 22-hour outage of its website in 1999 due to software flaws. It cost eBay $5 million in revenue and an 11% drop in share price. The outage affected 1.2 million customers who were either trying to sell or buy something on the website.
Along with the growth witnessed in off shoring of software testing to India, the average deal size of such projects is also on the rise. A few years ago, the average deal size for an outsourced testing project was about $50,000-60,000, requiring a few testers. That has now grown to about $2-4 million per project.
According to Gartner, India will require around 18,000 testing professionals every year over the next three years to fulfill the demand seen in the software testing market.
