According to a leading global market research company, spending on software testing was €79 billion in 2010 and the figure will rise to €100 billion by 2014. It has become the fastest growing major areas of business investment . This is because organizations now greatly appreciate what the cost of insufficient and misdirected testing can do to their business. Now, this is good news for all software testing service providers globally! But as service providers, how do you plan to capitalize on this opportunity?

With trial services becoming a commodity market, how do you plan to differentiate your offerings from thousands of other players, both locally and globally?

Although global spending on test automation is increasing, what ensures that this spending on software testing is equal to revenue from outsourced testing services?

Being in conversations with global product players in banking, technology, automotive, all I see as a common thread is to aggressively build highly scalable testing processes in-house. This is not because you are not competent, but the scope of the results of an outsourcing and offshoring engagement is limited even today. You may get new projects due to your expertise or domain expertise or cost arbitrage. But how can you increase the value of services in the eyes of the buyer without impacting profitability?

What if you could bill your customers in full for the specific actions and results you drive? I know you know. I’ve thought about it. They have also partially done so. But you also know that you cannot offer such a commitment completely. This is not because you don’t want to. But due to immaturity in current testing technology. You cannot evade your initial investment which is now justified by revenue through the time and material model.

Let’s take a very basic example here. You charge the customer for any error you find. The more bugs you find, the more money you earn. But, for the customer it does not matter if it is done through manual testing or through test automation. But how to avoid your initial investment? To find those many bugs through manual testing, you need more testers in a given period of time. With test automation, it sure would be faster and would also ensure significant coverage, but what about the time spent setting it up? You need highly skilled automation coders, investments in automation tool licenses, and other infrastructure. You may have a variety of accelerators, but they are also falling short of containing your costs in setting up an efficient testing process for a new customer. Their costs are fixed: salaries, tools, hardware and software, infrastructure. This forms the core of your automation cost.

What are you going to do today? How do they plan to increase profitability without affecting service quality? How can you increase quality assurance for your customers without increasing the costs to provide that assurance?

The answer lies in the speed and ease with which service providers create scalable and maintainable test automation. The answer lies in scriptless test automation.

Scriptless test automation is an approach that enables manual testers to create test automation on budget, ahead of time, and without the need for scripts. It is an approach to increase the maintainability and scalability of automation. It is an approach to reduce the cost of automation. It is an approach to increase the quality assurance of a product. It’s an approach that will help service providers like you make every resource, including man and machine, profitable.

I am aware that you know what it is without a script. But, the idea here is to convey that it is actually within your reach. You can do it.

There are many reasons to take an unscripted approach. The benefits are many and the realization of ROI is much faster. One must contemplate what makes script-based test automation so expensive and how scriptless test automation is a pleasurable experience. You also need to calculate how non-scripting impacts your test ROI.