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The Federal Government of Nigeria is set to collaborate with the Nigeria Software Testing Qualification Board (NGSTQB) in democratizing software testing to train and certify 50,000 software testers in the next three years.
Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Prof. Isa Ali Pantami revealed this while delivering his keynote address at a one-day virtual workshop organised by the NGSTQB with the theme ‘Role of Software Testing in Nigeria’s Digital Economy.’
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With the increasing integration of software into every sphere of human life and the need for a secure system, the NGSTQB said it was working towards collaborating with major stakeholders in different sectors where licensed professionals would provide software testing as a service.
“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 am able to sell that software,” said Pantami who was represented by the Director General, National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi.
“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,” the minister added.
The minister said collaboration with the NGSTQB and other stakeholders is strategic to creating the much needed army of software testers. the Minister,
His words” “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”
According to Pantami, for Nigeria to achieve the ambitious target of 95% digital literacy by 2025, the country needs to build the literacy of citizens in order 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 said while adding that there is no much use with an off-the-shelf software as there is no fit-all-size software developed and the only competitive advantage is to have digital offerings that best address a business exclusive need as every company is unique.
Earlier in his welcome remarks, the President NGSTQB, Mr. Boye Dare, stated that NGSTQB aims to work to make Nigeria the hub for 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,” said Dare.
Dr. Usman Gambo Abdullahi, NITDA’s Director of Information Technology Infrastructure Solutions said as part of the agency’s regulatory function, the agency has established the Software Testing and Quality Assurance framework to help strengthen the software ecosystem.
