By Manish Shivhare

Companies around the world invest more than $50 billion per year on applications testing and quality assurance, according to Pierre Audoin Consultants (PAC).

Research firms such as IDC and Forrester report a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15.4 percent with spending reaching nearly $19.3 billion by 2015 on testing services alone.

The following 6 trends are in the software testing industry tower:

1)( Mobility Application Testing : IDC predicts that the volume of Smartphones is estimated to reach over 500 million shipments by 2014.

These smartphones are used by buyers to congregate their personal and professional necessities. ‘There is a plethora of mobile handsets which run millions of applications embedded in it.

Some of the applications today are using the power of cloud to communicate with the ERP systems. In such situations, the data security is of paramount importance. The multitude OS used on the handsets adds to the challenge calling for functionality testing and integration testing.

2) Testing-as-a-Service: Research says that there is increasing usage and demand for TaaS as an alternative for ‘avoidable’ infrastructure spend.

Today most CXOs perceive TaaS as a tool to address the concerns pertaining to cost reduction, managing wide range of testing projects, test competence needs, exigency to resolve higher defects rates, and using third party’s test environment to subside the project requirements. TaaS offers a platform to utilize shared resources in pay as you go model. TaaS is sometimes referred to as Cloud Testing or Managed Testing also.

3) Cross cloud testing: There are very few initiatives taken to standardize the data formats and communication patterns among the clouds. Standardizing the communication patterns will help users to secure their data, gain confidence in their testing vendors and result in seamless transition. Soon we will witness a trend where vendors would engage themselves in testing apps over cross cloud implementation.

4) Business Intelligence Testing: The efficiency of any business intelligence tool does not only reside in its ability to analyze the vast pool of data.

An important indicator of efficiency is how effectively the tool gives meaningful options to its user to extract real time data and identify the key trends using this data. This calls for an extremely efficient system that can pull out the data, clean it and present it in a ubiquitous way without compromising on the performance of the system or causing a downtime.

5) Crowd sourced Testing: Momentum for crowdsourced testing is already building across the industry. IDC expects that traditional outsourcers will increasingly compete with evolving cloud crowdsourcing models for testing applications (e.g., Web apps, mobile apps). As a trend in 2011, it is  observed that  enterprises now prefer a crowdsourced marketplace so as to get access to global talent and diverse set of skills.

6) Testing catalyzed through test data generation and management: While testing an application, more often than not, confidential information of customers gets exposed to testers.

A breach of this data can lead to serious damage, both to the brand and business.  Test data management ensures the availability and security of the test data by obfuscating it on large scale testing engagements. Lots of testing vendors are now researching on various methods to mask this data or create ‘test-only’ data and help maintain privacy and security while using it.

NASSCOM reported a growth of USD 3.5 billion for testing services in 2010 and a steady growth at 17 percent CAGR until the year 2020. As more and more companies are now outsourcing their testing requirements the market is set for to vault and these 6 towers will be the front runners.

Manish Shivhare works with the Marketing team at AppLabs (a CSC company), the world’s largest software testing and quality management company. His responsibilities include Market Research, Analysis and Forecast.

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Tags: AppLabs, business intelligence testing, cross cloud testing, crowd-sourced testing, Manish Shivhare, mobility application testing, trends in computer software testing