With the increasing integration of software into every sphere of human life and the need for a secure system, the Federal Government of Nigeria is set to collaborate with the Nigeria Software Testing Qualification Board (NGSTQB) in democratizing software testing.
Licensed professionals would provide software testing services as the Board said it is working towards collaborating with major stakeholders in different sectors to train and certify 50,000 software testers in the next few years.
The Honourable Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Prof. Isa Ali Pantami made this known while delivering his keynote address at a one-day virtual workshop organized 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, represented by the Director-General, National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) 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 that 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,” said the Minister.
“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”, he continued.
Prof. Pantami maintained that to achieve the ambitious target of 95% digital literacy, the need to build the literacy of citizens for them to understand and consume digital services is essential.
“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 declared.
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 President of 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.
Mr. 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 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.
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