Francesca Matteu at Stickyminds.com reports:
In response to an increase in demand for quality software products, new testing centers are sprouting up in India, which also means an increase in demand for testers. The new hiring boom for testers is evident in cities like Bangalore where there is a need for about 10,000 testing engineers that needs to be filled in the next six months. Some Indian companies have even doubled yearly salaries to attract experts from neighboring cities. Yet the increased salaries remain only a fraction of what testers make in the United States.
Interestingly these are being called Independent Software Testing (IST). Big software companies like Microsoft or Sybase are unlikely to farm out core product testing to ISTs. But I can see that smaller ISVs may get considerable benefits from not having to own/operate an internal testing group, no?
Lionbridge Technologies, the parent company of VeriTest, has set up a testing center in India, and Accenture plans to outsource their testing efforts to an Indian IST firm. Vidur Kohli, head of testing at MphasiS BFL in India, says, “They used to say this is where failed programmers went. Not anymore.”