“The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep.” - Robert Frost Software Testing has been evolving since the dawn of computing as a science, an art and a profession. Until 1956 testing was considered as debugging only, when in 1979 Glenford J. Myers separated testing from debugging. Since then software Testing has gone through an era of vital & drastic changes. It never ceased its evolution & has since paced a continuum. In an article, Adobe President & CEO, Shantanu Narayen said “we have witnessed a profound evolution in the software industry there - an evolution that is mirrored in the growth of our own India operations.” He has also mentioned that in Phase One- Testing was an integral part of their outsourcing to India in late 90s. Software Testing is on a path of an evolutionary trend & has seen a continuous improvement and changes in the way testing was performed in 80s and now. “Test Early & Often” is the new punch line of the software testing trends prevailing today, and thus seeing an agile methodology being accepted worldwide which has huge benefits in terms of TCO, ROI, and faster mechanism of finding & fixing bugs.

In this paper we will discuss the yesteryears as well as prevalent trends of testing, Business Trends Overview, Market Drivers, Offshore Testing Trends, and THE APPROPRIATE STRATEGY. The business trends have been discussed here keeping in mind the comparison from the past to the present highlighting the future as well, learning from past experiences. The data and data points is based on the research from leading research centers and analysts.

The future can in the software testing arena, mentioned in an AMR Research article is “Software testing company leaped nimbly into the e-commerce arena a few years ago, and has been riding high in a rapidly expanding market. High-profile Web failures such as the 1999 eBay crash and overloaded Websites during Christmas 1999 have also made the need for testing and monitoring Web operations critical.” Shirish Sawant, Associate Vice President of Deloitte Consulting India point out the fact that “Today the focus of software industry is shifting from just providing working software/systems to providing a mechanism for cost reduction and an efficient system which has an integrated packaged delivery method which is also reflected in the software testing world with the test management tools like Quality center continuously evolving through various phases.”

Neha Thakur is experienced software testing professional whose written articles and presentations have received awards and she recently spoke at the CAST 2009 conference in Colorado on stakeholder management. She is a business technology analyst at Deloitte India (P) Ltd, Mumbai, India. Her interests and expertise include test automation, agile testing and creative problem solving techniques. Neha has also presented her whitepaper on “Agile: A worthy Automation Testing Approach” which was selected as one of the BEST 25 papers in QAI Conference 2008 held in Bangalore, India.