The Federal Government at the weekend said that it was making arrangements to train one million software developers in the country over the next 18 months as a strategic step towards enhancing the nation’s digital economy’s drive.
The Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Prof. Isa Ali Pantami, made this disclosure in his keynote address delivered 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’.
He pointed out that to achieve this laudable goal, there was the need for all stakeholders across the various sectors of the economy to work together.
Pantami stressed that training and certifying more Nigerians as software testers had become imperative with the increasing integration of software into every sphere of human life and the need for a secure system and solicited the support of the NGSTQB in order to achieve the goal.
He explained: “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.
“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.
“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”, the minister added.
Commenting at the forum, President of NGSTQB, Mr. Boye Dare, explained that Board was ready to work to make Nigeria the software testing hub for the outsourcing software testing market in Africa.
