Viet Nam’s software industry grew 29 per cent this year, said the Ministry of Information and Communications.
At the two-day Viet Nam International Software Testing and Automation Conference hosted by LogiGear and event management firm MRD, the director of the ministry’s Information Technology Department, Nguyen Trong Duong, estimated the software industry would achieve a turnover of $1 billion this year, of which, 35 per cent would come from software outsourcing.

Duong added that one of the most promising software fields was software testing.

Nguyen Quoc Hung, chairman of LogiGear, said the US’s AT Kearne, a corporation that provides expert advice to clients across a range of industries, ranked Viet Nam among the top ten destinations for software testing over the last four years. The country ranked eighth this year. Hung said the global software testing market had developed at a rate of 17 per cent. He said Viet Nam had received numerous software testing contracts from foreign firms in Japan and North America.

Harry Robinson, an expert in software testing at Microsoft Corporation, said Viet Nam’s strengths were in software testing and test automation. In addition, he said Viet Nam had some competitive advantages such as cheap labour and a secure investment environment.

However, experts said Viet Nam was being held back by manpower limitations. In Viet Nam, there is just one software testing engineer for every five IT programmers, while the international standard is 1:3.

Hung said that to compete with other countries, Viet Nam had to demonstrate its ability to meet the needs of large prestigious projects.

VNS