The Federal Government has revealed that the Nigeria Software Testing Qualification Board (NGSTQB) will train and certify 50,000 software testers in the next three years in collaboration with major stakeholders in different sectors.
Speaking during his keynote address at a one-day virtual workshop themed “Role of Software Testing in Nigeria’s Digital Economy” organised by NGSTQB, the Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Prof. Isa Pantami, revealed governments plan to also democratise software testing to enable licensed professionals provide software testing services to Nigerians.
Seeking cohesive cooperation of the NGSTQB, the minister, represented by the director-general, National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) Mallam Kashifu Abdullahi said: “We want to see how we can license some of you to provide these services, that means if I develop software, I need to come to a certified tester to make sure I meet the standard quality assurance; all the basic bug-free, and the vulnerability assessment before I can sell that software.
“This will eliminate having the market loaded with software with a lot of vulnerabilities.
“We are working on building the capacity of 1 million developers in the next 18 months and we know we cannot do it alone that is why we need people like you to help us achieve this.
“We are already working with some multinationals to help us on this and we also need the indigenous people to key into this initiative and we also need as many testers as developers.”
Pantami maintained that to achieve the ambitious target of 95 per cent digital literacy we will need to build the literacy of citizens for them to understand and consume digital services.
“We can only achieve that if we can build error-free software locally so that we can build the confidence of trust of our consumers,” the minister added.
While disagreeing with the procurement of off-the-shelf software, he asserted that there is no fit-all-size software developed and the only competitive advantage you can have as a business is to have digital offerings; as every company is unique and needs unique software.
Earlier in his welcome remarks, the NGSTQB president, Mr. Boye Dare, stated that NGSTQB aims to work assiduously to make Nigeria the software testing hub for the outsourcing software testing market in Africa. “We believe we can achieve this by collaborating with major stakeholders in all different sectors in Nigeria by training and certifying 50,000 software testers in the next 36 months.”
In his remarks, the director, information technology infrastructure solutions, NITDA, Dr. Usman Abdullahi, said the agency has established the software testing and quality assurance framework to help strengthen the software ecosystem as part of its regulatory function.
