The US Department of Commerce estimated that software bugs cost $59.5 billion to the US economy. This statistics alone brings to fore the importance of "quality" of testing done as part of the software development lifecycle. There has been a growing demand for specialists in the software testing domain because of business imperatives of exceeding customer’s expectation and simultaneously keeping the costs low. Offshore software testing is now helping various software product companies, at different stages of maturity, to deliver better customer experience at reduced costs.

As per an IDC report, about $2 billion of the estimated $13 billion global software testing market is accounted for by Indian companies. India is becoming one of the leading destinations for offshore testing, with market opportunities for the offshore software testing companies currently at $2 billion, and expected to rise to $8 billion by 2008.

The difference between a product being "just fine" and "excellent" depends on who is doing the testing – a developer or an independent tester. One cannot let a fox guard the henhouse. Development team often ignore the defects or revert with excuses such as "It works on development setup; your configuration must be different!" to dismiss reported defects. The methodology of independent testing ensures that a set of new eyes scan the software to reveal the hidden bugs and shortfalls in application functionality. The independent functioning of test teams allows them to work without any peer pressure from their development counterparts. Team performance is measured by quality and quantity of defects uncovered and motivation is high due to recognition of independent team contribution to product quality.

"Independent testing brings many advantages to companies", asserts V Chandrasekaran, CEO, Aztecsoft. "It brings in objectivity, rigor and transparency to the testing and defect reporting process. In the process, companies can also gain time-to-market by outsourcing parallel activities in the product life cycle development." Most importantly, it provides checks and balances against the development team by being the 'eyes and ears' of the end-user/client. Aztecsoft has consolidated its software testing capabilities into a distinct practice brand - Aztecsoft-itest, which provides high quality independent software test services to its customers.

"Quality is very much on the minds of end users. Software is now used for mission critical purposes where bugs are absolutely not acceptable" says Abhay Joshi – Practice Head, Aztecsoft-itest. Talking about independent testing and our ability to get top notch testing talent - he says "There is no glass ceiling in these places – everyone is a tester and hence there is no limit to how far you can innovate and climb the corporate ladder"
 
Over the last few decades, introduction of web technologies, open source and multi-user environments has added to software complexity. The IT industry has transcended from client-server environments to web-based environments and ‘Software as a Service’ model. In these dynamic environments, software products and applications need to be tested for attributes such as scalability, security, portability and usability. Additionally, the focus of a test engineer has to transcend product functionality and move to high value added functions like product usability, user experience, and domain related testing. E.g. A product tester can bring in his knowledge of derivates and instruments to test a finance exchange application to uncover serious usability and functionality related issues and add value to existing test scripts. These would be left uncovered if a test engineer with no domain knowledge simply executes the existing test cases.