Technically, Software Testing is an investigation conducted to

provide stakeholders with information about the quality of a

particular product or service under test. In other words, software
testing is a process of verification and validation.
Test techniques include, but are not limited to the process of
executing a program or application with the intent of finding
software bugs (errors or other defects). Wikipedia
To test software, a tester is expected to know the software that is
to be tested, plus the tools required to test it. Often, it can be very
specialized, and your employer company may have to train you.
To be a good tester, you need to be very organized, logical,
meticulous, thorough, and patient.

Software Testing as a career Over the last few years, the profile of
the software tester has seen phenomenal growth. Testing has
become crucial for several application/product implementations
and businesses have begun to realize the importance of
structured testing of applications before their release.
In recent times, testing is seen as a good professional career for
many. From being a test engineer, one can grow to become a
senior test engineer, from a test lead to a test manager; or
alternatively, one can become a QA lead or QA Manager.
Moreover, the options available in the testing tools side are vast.
There are a number of functional, performance, security testing
tools besides test management tools like Quality Center from HP,
CQTM from IBM etc. The growth prospects in the Software Testing
domain are tremendous. As per the Gartner Forecast, the industry
will be worth $50 million with forecasted CAGR of 14 percent
through 2014.
Professionally trained software testers are in great demand
nowadays and are sought after in the industry. One can either

become part of an independent software testing company or join

an internal software testing department in a leading firm. The
demand for niche skills like SOA testers, Security testers, etc. is
high nowadays owing to a vast shortage in skills in test
automation areas. However, one must keep in mind the fact
that specialization is a must in a testing career One needs to
specialize to move ahead in the career path of testing. Following
are some of the key areas for specialization:
1. Domain Knowledge
2. Automation Testing Tools Knowledge
3. Professional Certifications
4. Niche Areas In Testing
Testers get paid good salaries, depending upon their level of
experience. Testers are paid as well as developers in most
companies, and in the case of some smaller firms, they may even
get paid more than the developers. It is difficult to find a good
tester, and the growth prospects are huge. Look out for software
testing jobs in your area so you can find out what software you
need to test, and what software you need to use to help you
figure out what's wrong with the software. At minimum, you
should know how to use the primary product that the company
creates. For example if you wanted to work for SAS, you'd need to
be very familiar with the SAS suite of software tools that they
create, update and sell.
Software Testing certification training is an integrated training
solution offered by Simplilearn. This training program includes HP
ALM testing program and CTFL online training. Candidates attain
course completion certificate from HP after completing the
training. After the HP Software Testing training, candidates can
choose to attempt ISTQB CTFL exam and attain CTFL

certification from ISTQB. Through this training program,

candidates will be educated on skills required for software testing
with additional knowledge on test design, static techniques etc.
Simplilearn provides Software Testing certification training
through blended mode of learning.

Software Testing is an investigation conducted to provide

stakeholders with information about the quality of a particular
product or service under test. In other words, software testing is
a process of verification and validation

The year 2014 witnessed cross border mergers, acquisitions and

rapid adoption of social media platforms. It also witnessed
creation of large chunks of data and rapid advancements in
mobile and cloud technologies. Another major advancement
was Internet of Things (IoT), which is slowly changing the way
how organizations interact with their customers, employees and
partners. In the current digital information age, individuals are
demanding improved connectivity and on the go access to
information, which is making businesses, Government
organizations and other public sector entities to be more agile
and flexible while offering services and deliverables.
The rapid influx of new technologies has thrown open new set of
challenges to the present day CIOs, increasing their
responsibilities towards delivery and support. Business
leaders are expecting CIOs to come out with innovative ideas and
outline a vision on how emerging technologies can shape up their
organizations.
Todays CIO is also expected to help organisations to
understand customer preferences in a better way and help them

retain customers, along with new acquisitions. The year 2015 is

going to be a huge challenge for the software testing fraternity
due to emergence of new technologies, lets take a look at some
of the latest trends in the software testing domain for the year
2015.
Software Testing Trends 2015
In 2015 as well, the top priority of businesses across the globe
remains Cost Optimization delivered through process and
technology. Additional priorities include supporting organic
growth, build new products and platforms and upgrade their
existing systems. Most of the IT leaders accept that integration of
existing IT systems is a top priority for their organizations. Digital
transformation remains another important focus and businesses
are ranking high on cloud computing and business analytics.
Quality and reliability are being given greater attention, which is
resulting in reduction of software application errors,
improving security and application performance. Social media is
being closely scrutinized by organizations in order to safeguard
from reputational damages that often result from the comments
posted on organizations social media channels. These testing
trends would also have a significant impact on the discipline of
quality assurance and software testing in 2015. I would like to
give due credit to Gartner and IDC for providing valuable foresight
on software testing industry trends for 2015 and beyond.
Software Testing Industry Predictions for 2015
Transformational Projects Will Drive QA and Software
Testing Budgets
Software testing budgets will be on the rise, especially in the
sectors of energy & utilities (E&U) and transportation, these
domains will most likely be spending 27 percent and 31 percent of
their budgets on QA and testing. It has also been
observed that most of the organizations are allocating more than

40 percent of their IT budget towards quality assurance and

software testingdomains.
Testing budget allocated for new software development initiatives
is now slowly overtaking budgets that are usually allocated for
software maintenance projects, which is a positive sign.
Consumer products, retail, financial services and transportation
sector are swiftly advancing towards new IT development
initiatives. IT trends such as big data analytics, cloud, mobility
and virtualization will continue to grow, although these are
considered as fairly expensive technologies to develop and
maintain.
Testing Center Of Excellence (TCOE) Continues to Grow
Another trend in testing is the concept of TCOE, completely
operational TCOE models have effectively grown to 26 percent
from a mere 4 percent in the year 2011. A TCOE can be present in
multiple forms, it can exist as a pure methodological support,
which will control QA and testing or can exist as a complete test
execution factory, which will provide on demand testing services
to software projects across the organization. Businesses are also
looking to set up TCOEs using a combination of best practices to
offer improved governance, process, control and metrics.
Crowdsourcing Good or Bad?
Crowd sourced testing a relatively new trend in software testing,
where software applications are made available to a large number
of end-users, who will try to identify defects and bugs. Crowd
sourced testing services are usually managed by companies as a
service. Interestingly, almost 27 percent of organizations have
already experimented with the concept of crowd sourced testing
and are willing to continue with this new software testing trend.
But I believe that crowd sourced testing can never replace the
conventional quality assurance and testing teams.
2015 is for SMAC Technologies

The increasing usage of social media, mobile, analytics and cloud

technologies also referred together as SMAC improves
operational efficiencies and strengthens relationships with
customers and end-users. There is a significant demand from
customers, employees and end-users for responsive, anywhere
accessible software applications that improve the areas of
communication, business and entertainment. The increasing
usage of social media is creating Zero Tolerance environment,
as any failure, error or outage is resulting in immediate exposure
to the global audience via social media channels. Organizations
will be spending 52 percent of their IT budget towards QA and
testing, out of which major allotments are 27 percent for cloud, 40
percent for big data & analytics and 17 percent for mobile.
Mobile, Mobile, Mobile
Mobile devices have become a part and parcel of our daily lives
and the same goes for businesses. Mobile technologies have
established themselves as an effective profit making assets for an
undeniably disseminated and on the go workforce.
Mobile Application Testing
The mobile application testing trend is going to have a major
impact on QA and software testing industry. There has been is a
steep rise in organizations that are practicing mobile application
testing, which stood at 31 percent in the year 2012, but increased
to 55 percent in 2013 and 87 percent in the year 2014 and it is
not an exaggeration, but the figures may actually rise up to 95
percent by the end of 2015. Functionality testing, security testing
and performance testing are the primary focus areas for
organizations that are involved in mobile application testing,
which are followed by usability testing, regression testing and
compatibility testing. Gartner predicts that there will be about
four Android devices for every Windows or Apple (iOS) device by
the year 2015.

Mobile Testing Best Practices

With the rapid changes in mobile technologies, businesses are
expecting matured mobile testing practices from organizations
offering mobile testing services. Software testing applications
should be able to support a wide range of devices and operating
systems, which would help in the creation of multiple test
scenarios / executions across multiple platforms. The
development lifecycle of mobile applications is relatively
compact as compared to a standard or a web application; hence it
is always a challenge for software testing teams to complete the
testing within the allocated time frame. Almost 40 percent of the
organizations agree that time is a crucial factor for QA and testing
teams, which highlights the importance of automation to perform
regression testing.
PC Gets Boost, Still Outpaced By Mobile

Android Rules, When It Comes To Operating System

Big Data and Analytics

Big data and analytics testing is a catching up trend in software
testing domain. It is not only about testing vast chunks of data,
but it is all about testing the correctness and accuracy of data
(i.e. Obtaining a meaningful and actionable information), which is
sourced from multiple platforms. As per my analysis, big data and
analytics testing will account for approximately 50 percent of the
total software testing budget in the year 2015. Big data and
analytics testing applications are highly complex and pose a big
challenge to the software testing teams.
The software testing teams will be working with data centric
processes and would not only be responsible to identify data
irregularities and quality issues, but also figure out performance
issues, security concerns, accuracy of ETL processes and most
importantly verify, if the sourced data is relevant and suitable for
business analytics.

Cloud Migration
Despite the odds cloud computing faced in its initial years, it will
catch up in the year 2015. Although, we have witnessed a decline
in cloud adoption in 2013 (20 percent), but it bounced back and
gained momentum by demonstrating a positive trend in 2014 (28
percent) and is expected to reach 32 percent by the end of 2015.
Organizations are benefiting immensely by adopting cloud
services, especially by building and maintaining cloud
environments.
It would be considerably easy for software testing teams in the
cloud environment, if they are provided the right environment and
desired ramp up to an agreed load capacity. On the contrary, not
all software applications can be hosted in the cloud environment
e.g. large enterprise systems, which require robust integration
testing would have to be hosted in a separate infrastructure test
environments. However, the cloud testing trend is here to stay for
a foreseeable future.
Conclusion
Considering the above software testing trends, statistics and
projections, we can confidently predict a bright future for quality
assurance and software testing domain, especially in the areas of
automation testing, performance testing and security testing.
Software testers need to be prepared and be ready to grab the
emerging opportunities in the 13 billion dollar software testing
industry.
IBISWorlds Software Testing Services market research report is a
comprehensive guide to market size and growth prospects. Our industry
reports offer strategic industry analysis of the factors influencing
companies, including new product developments, economic, lifestyle and
demographic influences, distribution and supply chain factors and pricing

issues. Full analysis accompanies our data forecasts to illustrate how the
market responds to emerging industry trends.

Industry Analysis & Industry Trends

The Software Testing Services industry has exited from an uneven
recession and recovery to post a 1.6% annualized growth rate in the five
years to 2014. Demand for software testing services ultimately derives from
total demand for software, as testing is an integral part of the development
process. As a result, revenue from software testing dipped in 2009 in
response to the 4.5% drop in private investment in computers and
software. But the recovery of business demand for software in the years
since has brought steady growth to the industry, with additional 1.5%
growth expected in 2014 to bring the market size to $3.3 billion....
Industry Report - Industry Products Chapter
Manual functional testing
Manual functional testing is by far the largest service provided by the
Software Testing Services industry. As its name implies, manual functional
testing is the process of manually testing software for defects. Typically, the
tester assumes the role of the end-user, using all of the application's
features to ensure the software performs as intended. The reason for the
large share of industry revenue is two-fold. First, even if automated tests
reveal no problems with an application, manual testing is almost always still
carried out to ensure nothing was missed. Secondly, manual testing
provides insight into how it feels to use the software from a user
perspective, something automated tests cannot reveal...

What is the Software Testing Services Industry?

This industry provides software testing services for clients, such as
performance testing, stability testing, usability testing and security testing.
This industry does not sell its own software, but it may use internally
developed software to complete its testing tasks.

Industry Products

Manual functional testing

Automated functional testing
Non-functional testing

Industry Activities

Manual functional software testing

Automated functional software testing
Non-functional software testing
Software development consulting

With the rapid increase in products and applications by n folds,

the software testing market is also undergoing transformation to align with
the disrupting environment. Testing services are increasingly shifting to
quality assurance in order to ensure business transformation. The Global
software testing market is experiencing changes that is enforcing the move
from being product centric to customer centric. Here are few facts about
testing market as a whole.
According to Nelson Hall, the overall software testing market size is going
to be $34 bn by 2017. Gartner predicts that the worldwide discrete software
testing market spending is to be increased by 14 % CAGR with product
testing growing at the rate of 9.1 % and application testing at 15.3 %. Also,
application testing acquires around 90 % of the software testing market
services. When we talk about traditional vs specialized testing services, the
traditional testing services spent is getting transferred more and more to
specialized testing spent which is due to the disruption in technologies and
thus leading to faster time to market.

Change is the only constant!

As customers seek for improved quality standards of products and services

with tighter costs, the pressure is built for vendors around driving
automation, improved workflow and traceability and metrics capabilities in
order to move up the ladder of maturity levels of testing and contribute to
QA transformation.

Adoption and awareness of independent testing services has been

growing, most rapidly in the United States, followed by the broader
Americas, Western Europe, and Asia/Pacific regions.
Here are few notes by various key analysts and sources that reflects how
the ecosystem of testing services is changing and shifting towards the
integration of application and product.

3/5 IT leaders state that their organizations are prioritizing

investments that support the integration of existing IT systems World
Quality Report

More integration is needed for applications and information, as well

as for the incorporation of emerging technologies (mobility, social, cloud
and analytics) into solutions Gartner

Evolution towards end-to-end integrated test frameworks IDC

Trendy affairs!

Following are the prime software testing market trends:

1.

Testing in agile: Today, most of the organizations requirement fast

and responsive Quality assurance testing services integrated with agile
development methods. Today, Agile adoption stands at the highest
priority for most of the industries today, agile test approach being a part
of it.

2.

Flexible pricing models: Today, there cannot be one size fits all
pricing model for all types of services. The pricing models not only vary
according to the services, test use cases but also on the region and the
clients. The models can vary from pay per use, use case based,
outcome based, time and material etc.

3.

Crowdsourcing: This model is driven by specialized testing services

, crowdsourcing is gaining traction in the market due to more of
localization and less need for specific knowledge. Hence there is low
cost involved which makes ti easily adaptable.

4.

Service virtualization and Testing is about continuous Quality:

Testing tools that capture, model, and simulate application behavior to
test the functional and nonfunctional behavior of applications in a
simulated production environment Forrester

5.

Service virtualization is similar to devops model and hence leads to

faster development and testing of complex application scenarios. It is
best suited for complex environments in order to reduce obstacles to
testing, simulating production environments and decoupling integration
dependencies.

6.

Cloud to be the driving force in testing market: In order to deal

with the upcoming IT infrastructure issues with booming technologies,
testing on cloud or testing cloud can provide on demand testing services
which enables handling of projects that are critical in nature and require
faster time to market.

7.

Cloud testing incorporates automated testing tools and covers

beyond functional testing.

8.

Mobility defining the next generation testing requirements:

9.

With the proliferation of mobile devices there is a need to ensure that

the quality of testing has to be standardized. With the boom in mobile
industry, the expectation is that there will be a hike in the mobile testing
tools in the near future. Mobile testing services can include mobile
application testing, mobile device testing and enterprise mobility
and systems integration testing services. Mobile application testing
services can include test planning and advisory, test scope definition,
test case development, test case execution, regression testing, system
testing, end to end testing, user acceptance testing, automation testing
etc. Mobile testing services are going to change the landscape of
testing in the near future.

10. Automation and Standardization: With the increase in focus on

faster time to market and shorter delivery time, the practice will incline
towards creating standard tools and accelerators that shorten project
timelines and reduce the risk factor. Also, with the increased demand of
more for less among CIOs, automation and reusability is emerging as
the hot buttons of testing services.