Indian software testing pie to touch 70%, says report

This was a news item in Economic Times on the saturday edition. It also appears that there are good opportunities in testing as a career in Indian software scene. But I am not so sure if it is a good thing for the organizations that outsources testing and the Indian software organizations who are into this.

If you really look at the rationale behind this, it is based on the premise that separating testing and moving it to a low cost region would save the companies a lot of money and make them more profitable. Also testing is considered a low value job compared to the jobs upstream of testing - development, testing etc. This is also a thinking fostered by the waterfall methodologies where each of the functions in isolation is optimized with the faulty premise that it will bring overall quality and value.

It is pretty amazing that companies indulge in this without really looking at things as a whole. Also the testers on the other side of the globe rarely get the complete picture, they typically do (mostly manual) what they were told to do with little exposure to customer value. It appears that short term cost reduction without any long term thinking is at work here.