Hardly a day has passed in the past couple of quarters without a service provider boasting of its testing services during the spurts of organizational restructuring, analyst meetings, and earning calls. Industry news portals carry articles on software testing almost every other day, and the revenue from this service line is growing fast, very fast. At the same time, industry sources tell us of amazingly low rates quoted by providers for testing services, even those delivered onsite.
With this – coupled with multiple queries from a variety of providers, buyers, and investors in the past six months, and our own questions on the seeming price play versus potential, leverageable innovations – it was clear the time had come for us to gain deeper insights into the current and future state of the independent testing services industry.
Thus, we recently launched a research initiative to determine the real deal in testing services.
Key areas covered in the report include:
- Innovations in the horizon (such as cloud, crowd, IP, and engagement models)
- Drivers and inhibitors of outsourcing the testing process (from both buyer and provider perspectives)
- Adoption trends across the buyer community (by size, geography, and industry)
- Contribution of various industries, geographies, resourcing structure etc. for providers
- Prevalent pricing and engagement models, typical deal size, duration, etc.
- Growth drivers, challenges in IP monetization, and what lies ahead for testing services
It was interesting to learn some major outsourcing industries are lagging when it comes to outsourcing testing services, how manual functional testing continues to dominate testing offerings, how T&M and fixed pricing are faring, and what’s happening on testing engagement models. Further, while on the surface testing continues to be a “hire manual functional testers in India” strategy for most providers, dig deep and you can see the flux in automation, IP creation, cloud, crowd, and various other innovations.
While discussing testing with large and small service providers, we could not help but see the value of innovation –yes innovation, the great lip service that has been done to death in IT services, but in testing there is more to it. We expected the providers to discuss the new and cool things they are doing in testing services, but such a strong focus on innovation took us a little by surprise. Therefore, the fundamental premise of our report was based on innovation and the path ahead for testing services.
