Software testing spends to hit Euro 100bn by 2014
Software testing has become one of the fastest-growing areas of corporate IT expenditure, and major changes are taking place in the commercial and delivery models, tool sets and skills requirements as the sector reaches a new level of maturity.
Software testing has emerged as one of the fastest-growing areas of the IT market, according to a new report from Pierre Audoin Consultants (PAC), Worldwide Testing Services Market 2010-2014: Key Growth opportunities & Sector Trends. The report found that global spending on testing software and services is currently out-stripping overall IT expenditure, and will continue to grow at a CAGR of 5.2 percent over the next four years.
Worldwide spending on testing (including both internal and external testing skills, tools and related hardware and systems) will reach approximately Euro 79bn in 2010, and will near the Euro 100bn mark in 2014. Testing is also becoming one of the strongest areas of recruitment in the IT sector, and PAC estimates that there are now more than 100,000 professional testers worldwide.
In the past, testing has often been overlooked in terms of its importance to the business as well as its contribution to annual IT costs. At many organisations it has often been the developers that perform testing over the course of a project, which meant that the true cost of testing is often buried within the overall development budget, and testing rigour is sacrificed in order to meet release deadlines.
But two factors have helped drive it up the list of priorities for IT decision-makers: the renewed pressure on IT to contribute to company-wide cost reduction programmes in the shadow of the economic slowdown, and a greater appreciation of what the cost of unsuccessful, insufficient or misdirected testing can be to their business. This has been highlighted by recent high-profile system failures at the London Stock Exchange, the US Aviation Commission and the State of Queensland.
“Businesses are increasingly looking to use external skills, in order to leverage suppliers’ greater economies of scale, gain access to lower-cost offshore skills and investment in tools and processes, and to support their increasingly complex technology landscapes,” commented Nick Mayes, senior analyst at PAC.
The report also identifies a number of high-growth niches within the testing market, including SAP and Oracle testing, managed testing services, application security testing and cloud-based testing.
“We had no doubt that the software testing sector is one of the fasting growing areas of the IT market. The recession and continuing IT project budget cuts are pivotal in driving this strong growth,” added Rudolf van Megen, CEO of independent software testing services company SQS. “Testing of IT systems to ensure quality is essential if you want to avoid expensive surprises when systems go into live operation. This is particularly important where an external supplier is involved; software can be very complex and independent testing is one of the best ways of establishing confidence that the system will behave in the way that you’re expecting it to. Effective use of testing helps to cut costs and early engagement with projects helps testers to spot potential issues before they become expensive defects.”
