Post the technological transformation in the last decade in the IT field worldwide & considering the current Indian IT (services & solutions) scenario, the global IT fraternity has realized the importance of establishing independent validation team/s to test their internal/external facing applications. This is primarily because of the huge financial & credibility losses they faced due to inadequate software testing phase in place in their product/application’s SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle). Currently a large amount of Software Testing/QA activities have been off shored to be managed by an independent set of people to leverage the expertise of the trained QA professionals available in India.

These days, the focus has been given to adopt various STLC (Software Testing Life Cycle) models using the existing architectural models like waterfall & iterative. The main goal to adopt this life cycle is to ensure that the intended software has been rigorously tested (or “QA ed”) using various types & stages.

The investment in software testing (QA) phase has helped various organizations to detect the system impacting defects at an early stage & allowed the fixtures of these defects at a comparatively low effort & cost.

The various types & stages of software testing in a typical STLC with mapping to SDLC are as follows:

Functional Testing	Corresponding SDLC Stage	Non functional testing
Integration testing Smoke/Sanity testing System testing I18N/Localisation Testing   Regression Testing (Manual/Automated)       User Acceptance Testing             Operational Acceptance Testing             Pre Production Testing       Post Production Testing	Pre roll out phase, group of users’ experience	Not Applicable             Note: Performance & Security Testing can take place between the UAT & OAT phase, depends on the outcome of functional testing phase.   Performance Testing Stress Testing Volume Testing Load Testing Endurance Testing Scalability Testing Security/penetration testing

As you see from the above schematic diagram, there’s a separate STLC phase for every phase in SDLC, which enables the detection of various types of defects at different stages, before the production roll out. Following are the (few) main intentions of an independent software testing/validation team:

• Catch the defects at an early stage & get it fixed from the development/support teams.
• Validate the entire system from the users’ perspective in terms of Test Coverage & Content.
• Mimic real time scenarios & ensure that the system is “good to use”.
• Deliver a “Production ready” system using various testing types, stages & methodologies.
• Give a ROI & confidence to the different stake holders for the investments made by them in this phase.

Following are the most widely used Testing Tools:

• Automated Testing: Mercury’s Winrunner, Quick Test Professional, Rational Robo, Silk Test etc
• Performance Testing: Mercury’s Performance Center, Load Runner

Overall, now-a-days the software testing activity has been taken seriously across the IT fraternity & as far as the Indian IT companies are concerned, this is proving to be a quick & high revenue generation tool with ample amount of work to be done. The current emphasis; apart from standard functional testing is mainly on providing packaged & specialized testing solutions like the Testing Automation, Performance Testing & Security Testing.

Software testing as a market has a lot of business potential in the coming years as the investments made earlier by the organizations are gaining momentum & overall, using this approach, the world is becoming flat & ready to face with the new technological paradigm shifts!