Offshore software services, especially offshore testing services, have been a very popular business all along. Benefits around cost savings, round the clock productivity have all been touted about. However times are changing. Testing services are at an interesting cross road where in some groups they have been merged with the core development services. This post is not for us to debate whether or not independent testing is needed. We strongly believe in the future and value of independent testing, but what we need to remember is the regular “run of the mill” providers are certainly endangered. They cannot continue to exist speaking of the basic benefits of offshore testing. A core differentiation is becoming inevitable. Ones that can prove this differentiation and act as an extended arm of the central product team have a much stronger case to thrive compared to the ones who merely work in an “execution mode”.

The market has self-corrected itself where several of these small players are no longer in existence or struggling to exist, whereas the business for the niche players is steady if not growing. In any industry a niche is always good to build and such a need is being increasingly seen in software testing currently. This could be a niche around a service type, a domain, resources with specific skill sets, testing labs that are highly sophisticated, access to unique set of resources such as the crowd etc. When an organization is busy with its core set of day to day activities, how can it look ahead and build a niche? Herein, regardless of the size of the organization it is important to have a separately functioning R&D team that can focus on building such an edge. It is important to set aside a small percentage of the core team size for this effort to ensure ongoing growth is funneled into the organization holistically rather than merely adding new clients for execution driven projects. Offshore software testing is definitely not a rosy (in some sense a no brainer easy) path to success, which may have earlier been the case. It currently needs a lot of careful planning, foresight and effective leadership to give an organization its niche, but once that is done, the remnant players are here to stay for a very long time.

We are moving into a cloud pervasive zone. Gone are the days, when organizations were considering whether to host their applications on the cloud or to continue to work in a “behind the firewall” scenario. The shift in mind-set to a services model, is becoming increasingly prevalent, that all organizations now have (or are planning to have) a SaaS offering of their applications. Microsoft is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year and Bill Gates, has sent word that the company’s new goal will be “Apps on all devices running on the Microsoft cloud”. How do all of these pan out for the tester? If one looks at this closely, there are a lot of positives in testing on cloud. Firstly, there is a lot of saving on the application and environment set up time. Earlier a tester used to spend several cycles and iterations making sure the test environment is fully configured and set up. With a cloud based offering of an application this is a huge win. Secondly, when local setups are maintained, reproducing defects, and later debugging them, was often a very inefficient process. Over the cloud, this becomes a very straight forward activity, where everyone on the product team gets the same view of the application and issues can be seen on the same light. The tester gets to test the application in an end user like environment from the very beginning making the test effort more relevant and practical. However, with all of these positives, the tester also has to be ready to use that one common build that is being used by the rest of the team on the hosted environment for testing. This could mean that the build is very dynamic and susceptible to changes, not offering a steady environment to test. Obviously there is also the other angle to this where the tester not just tests an application on the cloud, but also leverages the cloud to set up the test infrastructure be it test machines, test applications, any additional software he may need etc. Companies such as SkyTap, Device Anywhere are making it easier for testers to perform their quality activities by providing the required tools and applications on an on demand basis besides of course the major players offering test machine instances. Also, the cloud is no more restricted to just software, platform and infrastructure as a service – newer areas such as backend are all becoming a service. With the shift into the application world, we have probably just scratched the surface of what cloud could offer for us. As a tester, these are exciting times ahead and it would pay off to sharpen ones cloud testing skills