India is the king in software testing. Large software testing projects are outsourced to India. India has many trained software testers and a large pool of companies specialized in software testing.
As for Egypt, software testing is considered a relatively new domain. Most fresh university graduates in Egypt specialized in computer science or IT are not interested at all in working as testers or are not even aware of the existence of such career. Due to increased demand on software testers in Egypt during the past two years, educational institutions such as the ITI as well as scholarships offered by the Egyptian government started to offer programs for software testing to cater for the growing market need for testers in Egypt. We still have a long way to go.
One of the main obstacles facing the software testing career in Egypt is the misconception in the minds of most IT professionals in Egypt about the software testing career. It is viewed as a lower category job lower than software development. That's why many fresh graduates do not like to work as testers. Yet that is only one part of the problem. The other part of the problem, which might actually helped in growing the misconception, is that there have been, and still are, software companies in Egypt whom hire some sort of data entry people and call them testers. Those 'testers' are not really testers, for they do not write any test scripts nor really know anything about the software testing or quality assurance process. All they do is just try to find bugs in the system in a haphazard way without any process. This practice has given a bad reputation for software testing among IT professionals in Egypt, specially that those type of data entry people get lower salaries than software developers.
As demand for software testers increases in Egypt and as more real software testers graduate from current educational programs designed for software testers, I believe the software tester career will start to get its due recognition in Egypt. This will have a positive impact not only on the testing field, but on the software industry as a whole in Egypt as it would mean increased quality of software developed and tested in Egypt.
