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Ramakrishnan, a retired schoolmaster in Egmore, almost fainted when he received a telephone bill of Rs 18499.50 from the Chennai Telephones a year back. It was almost 30 times more than his usual monthly bill and it also had logs of calls that were never made by him or anyone in his family.

There was commotion at Ramakrishnan’s home till the telephone authorities explained about "an error in the billing software".

In another incident, far away in the United States, a software failure paralyzed the New York Mercantile Exchange and telephone service to several East Coast cities in February 1998 leading to huge public outcry.

Instances such as these highlight the mission critical nature and the human dependence on software.

 According to estimates made by the US-based National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the economic impact arising out of faulty software in the US alone range in the tens of billions of dollars and constitute 1% of its GDP. An error in software is commonly referred to as bugs. The impact of defective software is pervasive and the ramifications are not just limited to the enterprises, but also at the individual level.

For instance, a function every desktop user does many a times during the day is double clicking on an icon to open a program or an application. But sometimes the PC freezes and the user has to restart and in the bargain loses all the unsaved information. The problem most likely is due to a bug deep down in the OS. This happens on PCs, which have not had updates, but still a flaw embedded in the primary version, installed by the user.

Why Testing?
Testing is not a new phenomenon, but has been an embedded task in any software development exercise.  But with computing becoming pervasive, the workflow and functionality of the IT solutions have become imminent for meeting the wide-ranging business requirements of the enterprise. For instance, when manufacturing resource planning (MRP) of the 1980’s graduated into ERP in the 1990’s, it seemed that ERP was the panacea to all enterprise IT problems. But in the formative years of ERP boom, many implementations failed for two reasons - one the ERP solution would be very rigid and hence it failed to interface with existing processes. The second major pain area was the solutions conflict with the country specific issues. The failed implementations are the result of lack of functionality testing, both by the vendor and the end user at the BPR level. The hypothesis is clear; for any vendor, testing becomes integral and they can fix the bugs inherent in their solution by entrusting the activity to a third party tester. The testing companies rationalize that the third party tester is actually a beta user of the product, who drills down on the various layers of the solution and find critical faults.

They recommend appropriate patches and remedies for the loopholes in the solution. A third party tester makes more sense, as in most software development companies the programmer himself plays the role of a tester and the possibility of error identification is very less.

"Basically applications have fallen short on the required functionality, performance and usability factors..."

N Mahesh, executive director, Maveric Systems

Recently, both the vendors and the end users have started realizing the benefits of testing their solution mainly because the economic impact of a software failure have been resulting in huge cost implications.

The Big Picture—Outsourcing Edge
According to Gartner Group, the global software testing market is estimated at $13 billion (Rs 62,000 crore).  Industry estimates pegs the current global market size of outsourcing testing services at around $3 billion.

Says Sashi Reddy, CEO, AppLabs, "Since testing is one of the safest and most non-intrusive activity to outsource, there is a significant amount of testing business coming to India. This business is across all types of industries, but the financial services sector has been one of the most aggressive in outsourcing in this space."

AppLabs for instance is India’s leading software testing company with over 350 employees. It is also the only CMM-Level 5 independent testing company in the country.

Says Aswini Kumar, CEO, Thinksoft Global Services, " In the past enterprises have to rely on in house testing done by their IT vendors. But this has not been producing an acceptable quality of software at a sustained level. Testing which is one step in
the value chain of IT application development and roll out is now being viewed as a potential candidate for outsourcing."

India has an enormous opportunity to corner the testing market. So outsourcing-testing services will become a big opportunity.

Says Reddy, "Entrusting testing activity to the same developers who do the programming leads to disastrous results, as they tend to overlook things."

The emergence of pure play testing companies is creating a new business domain in Indian software space. Unlike routine software development companies, the testing companies operate at a totally different level. Take the case of Ready Test Go (RTG), a Chennai-based performance engineering and software testing company that provides testing services to enterprises like Citibank, Deutsche Bank, SBI, American Express, Dendrite, IFlex among others.

Says Sridhar Kulasekharan, COO, RTG, "Development companies do not adequately invest in architectural benchmarking. As a result, problems are usually detected at the eleventh hour.  Without rigorous testing capabilities in-house, the end product or solution delivered to the customer does not perform in line with SLAs." 

Agrees N Mahesh, executive director, Maveric Systems, "Quite a few questions have been raised with regard to ROI on IT investments in the last couple of years.

Today several large Indian technology companies have started depending on independent testing vendors to certify their software before deployment with end customers. Similarly end users like banks have now started, in a small way, to use the services of independent testing vendors to test the software provided by technology companies. These include tests for scalability, as well as various functionalities promised by the provider of software.

While there is no specific study made so far on the Indian market size for outsourced testing, many believe the opportunity is huge. And the pure play testing companies clearly have the early mover advantage in this space. As enterprises expect more from every IT implementation, the vendors are increasingly facing problems meeting their expectations. Given that, more and more software development companies will outsource the testing part, and this likelihood creates immense opportunity to pure play testing companies in India.

Shrikanth G in Chennai

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