Software & testing outsourcing to India has become a big issue for companies and US workers. Companies want to reduce their costs, if you were in business and told that it would cost $200,000 to develop an application in the US and $50,000 in India what decision would you make?
Well lots of companies are sending their projects overseas, but not only to India, apparently India is not even the largest location for outsourcing, Ireland and Canada are in the number one and two spots. However, India is seen as having the most potential for outsourcing of software development projects due to its lower costs of doing business, but this is balanced against higher geo-political risk, you may remember the Pakistan-India scare of a few years ago.
In a trend reminiscent of Japan’s manufacturing quality movement, Indian companies actually have a higher level of certification on quality standards than their counterparts in the US. Merrill Lynch recently reported that India has the largest number of CMM (Capability Maturity Model) Certifications for software processes.
With the downturn in the economy, many software programmers in the US are facing higher rates of unemployment. But now there are political repercussions for this software unemployment, cities and states are considering requiring vendors to certify they are using US labor and politicians across the country are developing policies that seek to combat the issue of outsourcing. Economics is a hard fact of life to legislate against. However, there is one area of the software development process where I’d argue there is a requirement that a company has employ highly skilled workers in the US, and that is load and stress testing.
Here’s why, you might outsource the development of code, but to truly test your application in the environment it is going to reside within, you have to run the load testing of your web application in the actual web site environment. That means you have to test your application on the servers, databases and infrastructure in the US. That testing has to be completed or at the very least developed in the location of the web application environment. This means companies are going to need highly skilled software testers to do planning and oversee the final load testing of an application here in the US.
Outsourcing brings big benefits such as lower costs, but there are also problems. Distance and time differences are some of those problems. A US based project manager or business product owner has to make sure they have really planned a project and maintain greater oversight over long distance projects. Critical to the success of outsourcing projects is the provision of good testing reports. This means that there is an even greater need for good software tools that provide easy to use and comprehensive reports with outsourcing.
Automated testing tools like Mercury Interactive’s LoadRunner, Quotium Technologies’ QuotiumPRO and Compuware’s QATest provide excellent reporting of load testing projects that help you identify bottlenecks quickly. Outsourcing is certainly a reality of today’s world, I’d argue that load testing your web application here in the US is also a reality, therefore software testing engineers with automated testing skills have better chance of getting employed in the US.
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