Based on your Expertise please share what will be the top Trends to drive market for Leading software testing Companies in 2012-13.

"According to me, top 5 Trends which will drive the market for software testing in 2012-13 are as follows:

1. Mobile/Smartphone Testing: Now-a-days, mobility is not just limited to receive/make calls on-the-go, but has transformed as an essential living style. Mobile/Smartphone testing assures the quality of mobile devices, like mobile phones, PDAs, etc. Now days, Smartphone’s are used by many persons to congregate their professional and personal necessities. Plethora of mobile handsets which execute millions of applications inbuilt. Today, some of the applications are using the power of cloud to communicate with the ERP systems.

2. Cloud Testing: It is a type of software testing which ensures the quality of the process through which the organizations can use applications on the internet without investing in new infrastructure and licensing new software. Cloud testing is a web based Website Testing Service that allow testers, website managers and developers to automate and speed up the testing of their websites using real browsers from the cloud. There are few initiatives taken to standardize the communication patterns and format of the data among the clouds.

3. Agile Testing:  This evolving methodology helps to release the product in the market ASAP by continuous releases of functional software (rapid agile sprint process).

4. Web Accessibility Testing: It is a division of usability testing where the targeted users have disabilities that involve how they use the application.

5. Independent Outsourced Testing: It provides a neutral and fresh approach which is essential for the market success of the software product.

6. Testing-as-a-Service:  There is an increasing demand and usage for Testing-as-a-Service

As an alternative for ‘avoidable’ infrastructure spend. TaaS is referred to as Cloud Testing or Managed Testing.

7. Business Intelligence Testing: Efficiency of business intelligence tool does not reside in its ability to judge the vast pool of the data. How effectively the business tool gives meaningful options to the user to search the key trends using the data and extract real time data is the most important indicator of the efficiency.

8. Testing catalyzed through test data generation and management:  At the time of testing any application, confidential/ disambiguation information of customers gets exposed to the testers.

Be it agile testing or testing in clouds and or applying your strength in automation or having mobile testing labs operational. All is so very demanding and coming up. The so evolving and developing application world makes point to have the best time to reach market and with best quality. So the testers are on toes to have the best approach forward.