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— Anand Parthasarathy

Testing pie: The Infosys CEO, Mr Kris Gopalakrishnan, inaugurating the STeP-IN, International Software Testing Conference in Bangalore. Mr T. Ashok (Centre), Founder-Director, Stag Software, and Mr K.K. Natarajan, CEO, IT Services, Mindtree Consulting, are also seen.

Anand Parthasarathy

Bangalore Jan. 19 Murphy’s Law – Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong – has ironically a huge wave of opportunity for Indian software professionals: testing software applications before the developer unleashes them on the paying customer, so that all the glitches are fixed, is a $13-billion global business – and half of this, worth $6.5 billion – will be outsourced by 2010.

This was the upbeat message heard by over 1,100 software testers – the largest gathering any where in the world of a close knit but competitive fraternity in one of the less-well known reaches of the software industry. They are attending, STeP-IN, the fifth annual international conference on software testing that ended here on Saturday.

Inaugurating the conference, on Friday, the Infosys Chief Executive and Managing Director, Mr Kris Gopalakrishnan, characterised the special feature of the Indian software testing community – the world’s largest – as competition going hand in hand with cooperation: they competed with each other, which made for better quality, even while joining hands to create a brand name for Indian testing.

“The new differentiator is user experience,” Mr Gopalakrishnan added, “Do they (customers) like what they see? Does the product serve novice and expert, alike?”

In his keynote address, Mr Krishna Kumar Natarajan, President and CEO, Mindtree Consulting, felt Indian engineers should aim for at least 65 per cent of the outsourced testing pie that would be worth $6.5 billion by 2010.

He added there was room for the ‘biggies’ like Infosys who derived up to 10 per cent of their revenues from software testing – as well as for focused, independent test houses.

“Today the tester has won a seat on the product management table,” he added.

He cautioned the gathered testers that they would have to evolve new modes like remote or offline testing in response to technology trends like “Software-as-a-service”.

The annual gathering of the testing community, now in its fifth year, is anchored by the non-profit STeP-IN Forum and hosted by QSIT, the Bangalore -based testing consultancy.

It attracts almost every Indian testing company and increasingly, global majors in this software niche as well.

The event saw presentation by players such as Satyam, HP, Aztecsoft, Sun, IBM, Wipro, Accenture, Tech Mahindra, Empirix, Compuware, Infosys and MphasiS (EDS).

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