BANGALORE: What began as another way to improve bottom lines has now become a key differenciator for Indian IT firms. Software testing has come of age even as several firms have begun to offer this as their main line of business. Gone are the days when this service offering came bundled along with others. Analysts have already placed their bets on this offering.

If ThinkSoft specializes in testing for banking sector, Sasken and Wirpo rule the roost in telecom. Infact, Wipro was one of the first to go all out and offer this service nearly five years ago. On the other hand, a company like RelQ was founded only to do testing. Today, it is not about giving testing work to a Tier I vendor, instead, domain specialisation within testing is the buzzword.

Going by the increasing amount of work that is coming India's way, it is estimated that the country needs 16,000-18,000 testers. High volumes of work that comes to Bangalore is the reason why some believe that this city alone needs another 8,000-10,000 testers now.

"Today, there are clients who do not prefer to give testing and coding work to same vendor. Testing is about domain specialisation," says Avinash Vashistha, CEO, Tholons, an investment and global services advisory firm.

For the second quarter, testing contributed 6.8% of Infy's revenues, while it already contributes 10% to Wipro's global revenues and is growing at 60-70% year-on-year. With over 5,000 people, Wipro prides itself in being able to test practically anything that is remotely connected to telecom.

"Whether it is the point-of-sale terminals for the retail sector or new software that gets released often in the cell phone industry, we are at a point where we can choose our own framework to apply our testing capability to any vertical," added Suresh Vaswani, president, Wipro Infotech.

iGate Global Solutions recently opened a Centre of Excellence for independent verification and validation within their Whitefield campus in Bangalore. The fact here is that this company chose to talk about testing only after it realised that this service offering had grown in stature within a short time span. This announcement came when the testing facility at iGate was over 300-strong. This company is all set to add nearly $10 million to the topline during this fiscal.

''It is purely for our large enterprise customers and product clients. The cost of fixing problems in software after launch is very high. Therefore customers now prefer end-to-end testing rather than specifics,'' adds Mohan Sekhar, chief delivery officer at iGate.

Source: One Stop Software Testing
An execellent web log and online resource center of Software Testing