Massive software testing conference

The largest gathering of testers to date is the recent STeP-IN, an annual conference for the software testing market place, which is now in it's fifth year. The event, which took place in India was attended by over 1,100 software testers ranging from programme test managers to performance testers and test analysts. Test tool vendors were also out in force.

The software testing market place is etimated to be over $13 billion by 2010 and it is forecast that half of this will outsourced. So there must be a fair bet that the next gathering will be bigger than this one. I am going for 2010 software testers attend the 2010 conference.

If you're interested in the keynote speech a summary can be found here.

Inaugurating the conference, on Friday, the Infosys Chief Executive and
Managing Director, Mr Kris Gopalakrishnan, characterised the special feature of
the Indian software testing community – the world’s largest – as competition
going hand in hand with cooperation: they competed with each other, which made
for better quality, even while joining hands to create a brand name for Indian
testing.
“The new differentiator is user experience,” Mr Gopalakrishnan added, “Do
they (customers) like what they see? Does the product serve novice and expert,
alike?”
In his keynote address, Mr Krishna Kumar Natarajan, President and
CEO, Mindtree Consulting, felt Indian engineers should aim for at least 65 per
cent of the outsourced testing pie that would be worth $6.5 billion by 2010.
He added there was room for the ‘biggies’ like Infosys who derived up to 10
per cent of their revenues from software testing – as well as for focused,
independent test houses.
“Today the tester has won a seat on the product
management table,” he added.