Last week, I wrote about technical services and why they are crucial to a technology company that produces both software and hardware. Today, let’s talk about testing services. Testing new software is a critical part of any new software, says Ms Sumitra Gomatam, director and practice head, testing services, at the Chennai-based Cognizant Technology Solutions. Ms Gomatam holds a big job in Cognizant, heading a 2,000-strong team of software testing professionals.

"Any new software that is developed in-house or outsourced, needs to be verified and validated. Essentially, what software testers do is break down a piece of software and then build it up again, ensuring that the software is indeed doing what it is designed to do, and has the robustness to be scaled," Ms Gomatam said in an interview, explaining the basics of software testing.

And, apparently, it’s a good business to be in. According to her, the margins for testing software for third parties, that is clients, are substantially higher than in software code writing. That’s a view echoed by Mr Sashi P. Reddi, CEO of AppLabs Technologies.

"The margins are higher because we charge up to $3,000 per engineer for some testing jobs," he told me in an interview earlier this year. I am great fan of Mozilla’s Firefox Internet browser. It’s more robust than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. While I have great regard for Windows, it’s web browser that sucks.

Sometimes, at least, hanging up at the most inopportune moment. The browser hung up again when I was trying to download IE7, but that’s a different story. Anyway, the Firefox, too, has been having its share of trouble. Mozilla now says it will not be including the Places feature in Firefox 2.0. "As we have been preparing for the FF2 Alpha2 on May 9, it has become increasingly clear that we do not have time to complete an implementation of Places that lives up to our standards of user experience and quality. Places is a complex and exciting feature which changes the way people use bookmarks, history and navigate through their private space of the web. Rather than rush it to market, we’d prefer to spend the time it takes to get it right," says Mr Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla’s director of engineering, in a message on a developer’s message forum.

"Thus, we are going to disable Places on the 1.8 branch and continue work on the feature on the trunk for inclusion on a future release. This is a difficult decision, but doing it this early in the release cycle gives us the time to focus on delivering an extremely high quality FF2 in Q3 and gives Places the room it needs to develop into a truly innovative feature," Mr Schroepfer says.

After Posco, the Orissa government is now making an all-out effort to woo another global steel giant — MMK of Russia. The state government, has nominated its bureaucrat Gokul Chandra Pati, principal secretary of industries, to take the initiative.

"After Posco, we are quite hopeful to attract yet another big foreign direct investment and for that purpose, we are negotiating with the MMK of Russia. The company is now studying the conditions in the state and a decision on their investment plan is expected to be finalised soon," Mr Pati told reporters at Hanover on the sidelines of the international trade fair. A technical team of MMK, said Mr Pati, has already visited three sites, Gopalpur, Dhamra and Keonjhar, and are understood to have expressed satisfaction over the conditions to set up a steel plant.

Although the Magnitogorsh-based Russian steel maker is yet to finalise any of the three sites, government sources said the company is contemplating more on Gopalpur in Ganjam district since the place has a natural port.

At present, the port is being developed into an all-weather port by a consortium led by Orissa Stevedores Limited. The sources added that MMK has already conducted a feasibility study for desalination of water in the region which is deficient in fresh water. The MMK is one of Russia’s largest steel companies with an installed capacity of about 12 million tonnes. The company had indicated its plans to set up a steel plant during a recent meeting of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh with Russian president Vladimir Putin and industry leaders.

Industries secretary Pati informed that the state government was giving utmost priority on infrastructure building to prospective investors. "Orissa is rich in mineral resources. We are now focusing on infrastructure development such as rail and road connectivity for giving a further boost to our industrialisation process," Mr Pati said at a recent meeting of industrialists and port authorities in Bhubaneswar.