30,000 software testing professionals needed

Alor Setar: Malaysia would need some 30,000 certified software test professionals to achieve the nation's economic target by 2020.Universiti Malaysia Sabah's (UMS) Faculty of Computing and Informatics Dean, Dr Ag Asri Ag Ibrahim, said under the 11th Malaysia Plan, software testing has been identified as one of the focus areas to be developed as a new source of economic growth for the nation.

"Software testing has indeed become a major topic of interest among universities and industry in Malaysia today thanks to the continuous awareness and promotion activities carried out by MSTB (Malaysian Software Testing Board) under the MSTH (Malaysian Software Testing Hub) initiative," Ag Asri said during the Software Testing Talk at UMS, here, Wednesday.

Ag Asri said UMS is also involved actively in contributing towards achieving the target number of software testing experts.

"As a start, we have conducted a four-day training for our students in June. The training is designed to prepare them for the International Software Testing Qualifications Board's (ISTQB) Certified Tester Foundations Level examination.

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"Thirty-four participants successfully completed the training, and 30 of them, students including lecturers, are CTFL-certified."

The seminar was organised in conjunction of the second adjunct lecture visit by the German Testing Board (GTB) team to Malaysia as part of the academic outreach collaboration under MSTH.

Three speakers from GTB presented talks during the seminar, namely Dr Armin Metzger – Agile Testing and Model-Based Testing, Jorn Munzel (The Tester Profession) and Werner Lieblang (Systematic Test Case Design Method in Practice).

Germany, according to Ag Asri, has long earned the reputation for quality and innovation, particularly in engineering and other technical disciplines.

"In the field of software testing, Germany is way ahead of Malaysia as the country had surpassed the 30,000 mark for certified testers in 2013.

"We are indeed fortunate to have GTB as partner in the MSTH Academic Outreach programme," Ag Asri said.

He said he is confident that the seminar participants will gain more knowledge from Germany's experience in software testing and "perhaps we can emulate some of the successes in our own quest for excellence."

Meanwhile, Metzger said the whole information technology (IT) sector is currently facing a significant change and challenges.

Among these changes are the Cloud system, Big Data, social media, the Internet of things and Industrie 4.0.

He added that there are two dimensions in the challenges in the IT world, namely increased integration of consumer and business driven requirements and transformation of homogenous, complex systems into heterogeneous platforms and architectures.

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"What's happening now is the interlink between the cyberworld and the physical world is getting closer and resulting a digital transformation of everything," Metzger said. And this transformation has also impacted the software testing field, especially on the processes, methods and skills.

"And that's why we have to build the skills to manage all those challenges and this is addressed by a qualification scheme represented by GTB and MSTB," he said.

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