According to a new study by International Data Corporation (IDC), spending on discrete enterprise application testing services in Europe was over $2 billion in 2010 and is expected to rise to over $5 billion by 2015, representing a compound annual growth rate of over 19%.
This approach to quality assurance (QA) is apparently evolving from predominantly reactive application testing at the end of the software development lifecycle (SDLC) — and this is driving validation into the front-end of the SDLC.
"This change in approach contributes to increased demand for discrete application testing services, as organizations seek to lower costs and optimize test efforts. The challenges of inadequate processes/methodologies, resources and expertise, and decreasing budgets push greater interest in considering a host of test delivery options," said Jennifer Thomson, IDC research director, European Application Services.
Thomson's team also estimates that U.S. spending on discrete testing services reached $4.7B in 2010, with projections for growth estimated at a 5-year CAGR of 13%.
"While the United States has led other regions in adoption of discrete testing services, in terms of both traditional and newer cloud-based testing services models, we are seeing an increase in regional interest and adoption of these services in Canada, Latin America, Western Europe, and parts of Asia/Pacific," she said.
The pressure to validate an increasingly complex set of testing requirements across different applications, architectures, and interfaces (e.g., SOA/cloud/mobile), multiple mobile OSs, form factors, and network technology layers is expected to tax most customers over the forecast period, says IDC.
According to Rona Shuchat, IDC's director of Application Outsourcing Services, "IDC expects that while internal IT or R&D engineering teams will increasingly look to leverage private and/or public cloud dev/test environments to improve efficiencies of operations, they will seek out third parties for their test resource expertise, test strategy planning, optimization skill sets, and automated integrated test frameworks to accelerate test cycles with greater test coverage at lower cost structures."
IDC's latest study is titled European Discrete Enterprise Application Testing Services Market Estimate 2010 and Forecast 2011-2015.
