Nigerian Govt To Rejig Software Ecosystem with 50,000 Software Testers Professionals

Nigeria is set to collaborate with the Nigeria Software Testing Qualification Board (NGSTQB) in democratizing software testing to license professionals that would provide software testing services.

The NGSTQB will be working towards collaborating with major stakeholders in different sectors to train and certify 50,000 software testers in the next in the next years.

Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Prof. Isa Pantami made this known while delivering his keynote address at a one-day virtual workshop organised by the Nigeria Software Testing Qualification Board (NGSTQB) with the theme “Role of Software Testing in Nigeria’s Digital Economy”.

Seeking cohesive cooperation of the NGSTQB the Minister, who was represented by the Director General National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Mr Kashifu Inuwa 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 am able to sell that software”.

He added: “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.”

He said, “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 noted that to achieve the ambitious target of 95% digital literacy, Government 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 stated.

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 as a business is to have digital offerings, since every company is unique and needs unique software.

President NGSTQB, 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.

Dare noted that by this effort, “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”.
Dr. Usman 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.