The Software Testing Market & The Business Outcomes of Its Growth

Analysts agree that the subsequent years, the software testing services market will flourish. How will that affect the entire IT industry? Which business areas will be most impacted by this growth? Will the effects be always positive?

The optimistic forecasts for the software testing services market are coming true as we speak. According to Marketsandmarkets research company which has produced its forecast on the basis of indicators from 2016, in 2017-2022 the value of this specific market will grow to $50.14 billion with the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) amounting to 13.5%.

In 2020, Technavio published its report on “Software testing services market by product, geography and end-user. Forecast and analysis 2020–2024”. According to the report, in the four years the market value of the software testing services market will grow by $ 81.73 million with the CAGR amounting to 12.62%:

The two above mentioned research companies also agree that North America will be the region with the biggest growth potential on the software testing services market. The related division of power has been illustrated by Marketsandmarkets in the following manner:

The software testing services market

In an article for Medium.com, Astasia Myers published a diagram which shows the major dividing lines on the software testing services market. It also provides a picture of the growth potential of the market’s specific parts:

The fastest growing areas of the software testing services market include test automation (17%CAGR) and API testing (19%CAGR). Testing services have the smallest annual growth rate (13%CAGR) but enjoys the biggest value ($50 million).

The possible business outcome of the processes

In order to foresee the outcome, the growing shares of the specific parts of the market need to be viewed from the perspective of the trends in software production. Here, the ever so popular DevOps and Agile methodologies play a significant role. The latter methodology was indicated in the latest report “State of the Agile 2019” as the most frequently applied in unit testing. Both methodologies enforce a quick rate of code development, at the same time placing strong emphasis on its quality and reliability. In order to ensure the best possible processes of monitoring quality and detecting errors in the resulting solutions, more and more often managers decide to automatize the work of testers and QA. This has been confirmed by the results of a survey carried out by Capgemini and published in “World Quality Report 2019-2020”:

The report’s authors draw attention to the fact that the need to increase work automation will involve increasingly advanced technologies for creating the right tools. Here, solutions based on AI and machine learning will have an important role to play.

Which solutions are the most popular among managers who want to streamline and accelerate tests in the DevOps and Agile environment? In a questionnaire developed by Capgemini, tools for automated tests were indicated most frequently. They were followed by the BDD (behaviour-driven development) which should not come as a surprise in the light of its benefits in solving complicated business problems and making decisions about the types of tests which are best for a specific situation:

The above chart shows also a third trend which has lately gained in popularity as the Agile – CI/CD methodology is developing. In the testing context it is continuous testing i.e. continued exchange of feedback between teams of developers and testers. It is possible on condition that a majority of the software testing processes are automatized. Only then the code quality can be effectively and sufficiently quickly checked.

These benefits have been appreciated in the IT industry for several years as presented below in a cross-cutting summary of the biggest benefits of automatizing the process of software testing. Every year, their value grows. Interestingly, in 2019 managers indicated better control and transparency of the supervised processes as the most appreciated value added resulting from automation:

The financial outcomes of the changes in the software testing services market

The development of automation tools has also decreased the costs of testing as evidenced by the summary below:

How was it possible to substantially decrease testing-related costs? The report provides information about employing:

• solutions for cloud testing which lower the costs, at the same time increasing the effectiveness and flexibility of the teams involved
• virtualization,
• Agile and DevOps methodologies,
• automation,
• shift-right testing i.e. testing is performed shortly before a solution goes live. Of course this does not exclude agile methodologies or code review in sprints, preferred by Agile.