Technically,Software Testingis an investigation conducted to provide stakeholders with information about the quality of a particular product or service under test. In other words, software testing is a process of verification and validation.

Test techniques include, but are not limited to the process of executing a program or application with the intent of finding software bugs (errors or other defects). Wikipedia

To test software, a tester is expected to know the software that is to be tested, plus the tools required to test it. Often, it can be very specialized, and your employer company may have to train you. To be a good tester, you need to be very organized, logical, meticulous, thorough, and patient.

Software Testing as a careerOver the last few years, the profile of the software tester has seen phenomenal growth. Testing has become crucial for several application/product implementations andbusinesses have begun to realize the importance of structured testing of applications before their release.

In recent times, testing is seen as a good professional career for many. From being a test engineer, one can grow to become a senior test engineer, from a test lead to a test manager; or alternatively, one can become a QA lead or QA Manager. Moreover, the options available in the testing tools side are vast. There are a number of functional, performance, security testing tools besides test management tools like Quality Center from HP, CQTM from IBM etc. The growth prospects in the Software Testing domain are tremendous. As per the Gartner Forecast, the industry will be worth $50 million with forecasted CAGR of 14 percent through 2014.Professionally trained software testers are in great demand nowadays and are sought after in the industry. One can either become part of an independent software testing company or join an internal software testing department in a leading firm. The demand for niche skills like SOA testers, Security testers, etc. is high nowadays owing to a vast shortage in skills in test automation areas. However, one must keep in mind the fact thatspecialization is a must in a testing career One needs to specialize to move ahead in the career path of testing. Following are some of the key areas for specialization:

1. Domain Knowledge2. Automation Testing Tools Knowledge3. Professional Certifications4. Niche Areas In TestingTesters get paid good salaries, depending upon their level of experience. Testers are paid as well as developers in most companies, and in the case of some smaller firms, they may even get paid more than the developers. It is difficult to find a good tester, and the growth prospects are huge. Look out for software testing jobs in your area so you can find out what software you need to test, and what software you need to use to help you figure out what's wrong with the software. At minimum, you should know how to use the primary product that the company creates. For example if you wanted to work for SAS, you'd need to be very familiar with the SAS suite of software tools that they create, update and sell.

Software Testing certification trainingis an integrated training solution offered by Simplilearn. This training program includes HP ALM testing program and CTFL online training. Candidates attain course completion certificate from HP after completing the training. After the HP Software Testing training, candidates can choose to attempt ISTQB CTFL exam and attainCTFL certificationfrom ISTQB. Through this training program, candidates will be educated on skills required for software testing with additional knowledge on test design, static techniques etc. Simplilearn provides Software Testing certification training through blended mode of learning.

Software Testing is an investigation conducted to provide stakeholders with information about the quality of a particular product or service under test. In other words, software testing is a process of verification and validation

The year 2014 witnessed cross border mergers, acquisitions and rapid adoption of social media platforms. It also witnessed creation of large chunksof data and rapid advancements in mobile and cloud technologies. Another major advancement wasInternet of Things (IoT), which is slowly changing the way how organizations interact with their customers, employees and partners. In the current digital information age, individuals are demanding improved connectivity and on the go access to information, which is makingbusinesses, Government organizations and other public sector entities to be more agile and flexible while offering services and deliverables.

The rapid influx of new technologies has thrown open new set of challenges to the present day CIOs, increasing their responsibilities towards delivery and support. Business leadersareexpectingCIOs to come out withinnovative ideas and outline a vision on how emerging technologies can shape up their organizations.

TodaysCIO is also expected to help organisations to understandcustomer preferences in a better way and help them retain customers, along with new acquisitions. The year 2015 is going to be a huge challenge for the software testing fraternity due to emergence of new technologies, lets take a look at some of the latest trends in the software testing domain for the year 2015.

Software Testing Trends 2015

In 2015 as well, the top priority of businesses across the globe remainsCost Optimization delivered through process and technology. Additional priorities include supporting organic growth, build new products and platforms and upgrade their existing systems. Most of the IT leaders accept that integration of existing IT systems is a top priority for their organizations. Digital transformation remains another important focusand businesses are ranking high on cloud computing and business analytics.

Quality and reliability are being given greater attention, which is resulting in reduction of software application errors, improvingsecurity and application performance. Social media is being closely scrutinized by organizations in order to safeguard from reputational damages that often result from thecomments posted on organizations social media channels. These testing trends wouldalso have a significant impact on the discipline of quality assurance and software testing in 2015. I would like to give due credit toGartnerandIDCfor providing valuable foresight on software testing industry trends for 2015 and beyond.

Software Testing Industry Predictions for2015

Transformational Projects Will Drive QA and Software Testing Budgets

Software testing budgets will be on the rise, especially in the sectors of energy & utilities (E&U) and transportation, these domains will most likely be spending 27 percent and 31 percent of their budgets on QA and testing. It has also been observedthatmost of the organizations are allocating more than 40 percent of their IT budget towardsquality assurance and software testingdomains.

Testing budget allocated for new software development initiatives is now slowly overtaking budgets that are usually allocated for software maintenance projects, which is a positive sign. Consumer products, retail, financial services and transportation sector are swiftly advancing towards new IT development initiatives. IT trends such asbig data analytics, cloud, mobility and virtualization will continue to grow, although these are considered as fairlyexpensivetechnologies to develop and maintain.

Testing Center Of Excellence (TCOE) Continues to Grow

Another trend in testing is the concept of TCOE, completely operational TCOE models have effectively grown to 26 percent from a mere 4 percent in the year 2011. A TCOE can be present in multiple forms, it can exist as a pure methodological support, which will control QA and testing or can exist as a completetest execution factory, which will provide on demand testing services to software projects across the organization. Businesses are also looking toset upTCOEs using a combination of best practices to offerimproved governance, process, control and metrics.

Crowdsourcing Good or Bad?

Crowd sourced testing a relatively new trend in software testing, where software applications are made available to a large number of end-users, who will try to identify defects and bugs. Crowd sourced testing services are usually managed by companies as a service. Interestingly, almost 27 percent of organizations have already experimented with the concept of crowd sourced testing and are willing to continue with this new software testing trend. But I believe that crowd sourced testing can never replace the conventionalquality assurance and testing teams.

2015 is for SMAC Technologies

The increasing usage of social media, mobile, analytics and cloud technologies also referred together asSMACimproves operational efficiencies and strengthens relationships with customers and end-users. There is a significant demand from customers, employees and end-users for responsive, anywhere accessible software applications that improvethe areas of communication, business and entertainment. The increasing usage of social media is creating Zero Tolerance environment, as any failure, error or outage is resulting in immediate exposure to the global audience via social media channels. Organizations will be spending 52 percent of their IT budget towards QA and testing, out of which major allotments are 27 percent for cloud, 40 percent for big data &analytics and 17 percent for mobile.

Mobile, Mobile, Mobile

Mobile devices have become a part and parcel of our daily lives and the same goes for businesses. Mobile technologies have established themselves as an effective profit making assets for an undeniably disseminated and on the go workforce.

Mobile Application Testing

The mobile application testing trend is going to have a major impact on QA and software testing industry. There has been is a steeprise in organizations that are practicing mobile application testing, which stood at 31 percent in the year 2012, but increased to 55 percent in 2013 and 87 percent in the year 2014 and it is not an exaggeration, but the figures may actually riseup to 95 percent by the endof 2015. Functionality testing, security testing and performance testing are the primary focus areas for organizations that are involved inmobile application testing, which are followed by usability testing, regression testing and compatibility testing. Gartner predicts that there will be about four Android devices for every Windows or Apple (iOS) device by the year 2015.

Mobile Testing Best Practices

With the rapid changes in mobile technologies, businesses are expecting matured mobile testing practices from organizations offering mobile testing services. Software testing applications should be able to support a wide range of devices and operating systems, which would help in the creation of multiple test scenarios / executions across multiple platforms. The development lifecycle of mobile applications is relatively compactas compared to a standard or a web application; hence it is always a challenge for software testing teams to complete the testing within the allocated time frame. Almost 40 percent of the organizations agree that time is a crucial factor for QA and testing teams, which highlights the importance of automation to perform regression testing.

PC Gets Boost, Still Outpaced By Mobile

Android Rules, When It Comes To Operating System

Big Data and Analytics

Big data and analytics testing is acatching up trend in software testing domain. It is not only about testing vast chunks of data, but it is all about testing the correctness and accuracy of data (i.e. Obtaining a meaningful and actionable information), which is sourced from multiple platforms. As per my analysis, big data and analytics testing will account for approximately 50 percent of the total software testing budget in the year 2015. Big data and analytics testing applications are highly complex and pose a big challenge to the software testing teams.The software testing teams will be working with data centric processes and would not only be responsible to identify data irregularities and quality issues, but also figure out performance issues, security concerns, accuracy of ETL processes and most importantly verify, if the sourced data is relevant and suitable for business analytics.

Cloud Migration

Despite the odds cloud computingfaced in its initialyears, it will catch up in the year 2015. Although, we have witnessed a decline in cloud adoption in 2013 (20 percent), but it bounced back and gained momentum by demonstrating a positive trend in 2014 (28 percent) and is expected to reach 32 percent by the end of2015. Organizations are benefiting immensely by adopting cloud services, especially by building and maintaining cloud environments.

It would be considerably easy for software testing teams in the cloud environment, if they are providedthe right environment and desired ramp up to an agreed load capacity. On the contrary, not all software applications can be hosted in the cloud environment e.g. large enterprise systems, which require robust integration testing would have to be hosted in aseparate infrastructure test environments. However, the cloud testingtrend is here to stay for a foreseeable future.

Conclusion

Considering the above software testing trends, statistics and projections, we can confidently predict a bright future for quality assurance and software testing domain, especially in the areas of automation testing, performance testing and security testing. Software testers need to be prepared and be ready to grab the emerging opportunities in the 13 billion dollar software testing industry.

IBISWorlds Software Testing Services market research report is a comprehensive guide to market size and growth prospects. Our industry reports offer strategic industry analysis of the factors influencing companies, including new product developments, economic, lifestyle and demographic influences, distribution and supply chain factors and pricing issues. Full analysis accompanies our data forecasts to illustrate how the market responds to emerging industry trends.

Industry Analysis & Industry Trends

The Software Testing Services industry has exited from an uneven recession and recovery to post a 1.6% annualized growth rate in the five years to 2014. Demand for software testing services ultimately derives from total demand for software, as testing is an integral part of the development process. As a result, revenue from software testing dipped in 2009 in response to the 4.5% drop in private investment in computers and software. But the recovery of business demand for software in the years since has brought steady growth to the industry, with additional 1.5% growth expected in 2014 to bring the market size to $3.3 billion.... Industry Report - Industry Products Chapter

Manual functional testing

Manual functional testing is by far the largest service provided by the Software Testing Services industry. As its name implies, manual functional testing is the process of manually testing software for defects. Typically, the tester assumes the role of the end-user, using all of the application's features to ensure the software performs as intended. The reason for the large share of industry revenue is two-fold. First, even if automated tests reveal no problems with an application, manual testing is almost always still carried out to ensure nothing was missed. Secondly, manual testing provides insight into how it feels to use the software from a user perspective, something automated tests cannot reveal...

What is the Software Testing Services Industry?

This industry provides software testing services for clients, such as performance testing, stability testing, usability testing and security testing. This industry does not sell its own software, but it may use internally developed software to complete its testing tasks.

Industry Products

Manual functional testingAutomated functional testingNon-functional testingIndustry Activities

Manual functional software testingAutomated functional software testingNon-functional software testingSoftware development consulting

With the rapid increase in products and applications by n folds, thesoftware testingmarket is also undergoing transformation to align with the disrupting environment. Testing services are increasingly shifting to quality assurance in order to ensure business transformation. The Global software testing market is experiencing changes that is enforcing the move from being product centric to customer centric. Here are few facts about testing market as a whole.According to Nelson Hall, the overall software testing market size is going to be $34 bn by 2017. Gartner predicts that the worldwide discrete software testing market spending is to be increased by 14 % CAGR with product testing growing at the rate of 9.1 % and application testing at 15.3 %. Also, application testing acquires around 90 % of the software testing market services. When we talk about traditional vs specialized testing services, the traditional testing services spent is getting transferred more and more to specialized testing spent which is due to the disruption in technologies and thus leading to faster time to market.

Change is the only constant!

As customers seek for improved quality standards of products and services with tighter costs, the pressure is built for vendors around driving automation, improved workflow and traceability and metrics capabilities in order to move up the ladder of maturity levels of testing and contribute to QA transformation.Adoption and awareness of independent testing services has been growing, most rapidly in the United States, followed by the broader Americas, Western Europe, and Asia/Pacific regions.Here are few notes by various key analysts and sources that reflects how the ecosystem of testing services is changing and shifting towards the integration of application and product. 3/5 IT leaders state that their organizations are prioritizing investments that support the integration of existing IT systems World Quality Report More integration is needed for applications and information, as well as for the incorporation of emerging technologies (mobility, social, cloud and analytics) into solutions Gartner Evolution towards end-to-end integrated test frameworks IDC

Trendy affairs!

Following are the prime software testing market trends:

1. Testing in agile: Today, most of the organizations requirement fast and responsive Quality assurance testing services integrated with agile development methods. Today, Agile adoption stands at the highest priority for most of the industries today, agile test approach being a part of it.

2. Flexible pricing models: Today, there cannot be one size fits all pricing model for all types of services. The pricing models not only vary according to the services, test use cases but also on the region and the clients. The models can vary from pay per use, use case based, outcome based, time and material etc.

3. Crowdsourcing:This model is driven by specialized testing services , crowdsourcing is gaining traction in the market due to more of localization and less need for specific knowledge. Hence there is low cost involved which makes ti easily adaptable.

4. Service virtualization and Testing is about continuous Quality: Testing tools that capture, model, and simulate application behavior to test the functional and nonfunctional behavior of applications in a simulated production environment Forrester

5. Service virtualization is similar to devops model and hence leads to faster development and testing of complex application scenarios. It is best suited for complex environments in order to reduce obstacles to testing, simulating production environments and decoupling integration dependencies.

6. Cloud to be the driving force in testing market:In order to deal with the upcoming IT infrastructure issues with booming technologies, testing on cloud or testing cloud can provide on demand testing services which enables handling of projects that are critical in nature and require faster time to market.

7. Cloud testing incorporates automated testing tools and covers beyond functional testing.

8. Mobility defining the next generation testing requirements:

9. With the proliferation of mobile devices there is a need to ensure that the quality of testing has to be standardized. With the boom in mobile industry, the expectation is that there will be a hike in the mobile testing tools in the near future. Mobile testing services can include mobile application testing, mobile device testing and enterprise mobility andsystems integrationtesting services. Mobile application testing services can include test planning and advisory, test scope definition, test case development, test case execution, regression testing, system testing, end to end testing, user acceptance testing, automation testing etc. Mobile testing services are going to change the landscape of testing in the near future.10. Automation and Standardization: With the increase in focus on faster time to market and shorter delivery time, the practice will incline towards creating standard tools and accelerators that shorten project timelines and reduce the risk factor. Also, with the increased demand of more for less among CIOs, automation and reusability is emerging as the hot buttons of testing services.