uTest Now Open for Business: Get Paid to Find Software Bugs

If they let me test Microsoft products, I would become a billionaire.

I agree
http://www.i-guide.ro

Interesting model…

This looks really promising. Companies get more bang for their testing buck, out-of-work techies get cash, and the public gets better software.

I like it.

Oh! Oh! TechCrunch. Give me money! Your comments are above the article!

Hey, Techcrunch Journalist stop spamming!!!

This is an absolutely wonderful idea! As long as the cost doesn’t spiral out of control I can see a lot of companies using this (we will certainly consider it). However, IMHO, there are two problems with this:

1) A paid beta user will find bugs but they can’t make suggestions which are as valuable as those made by one of your own users. They can test edge cases but they won’t use your product the same way that your real users do. As a result, any usability and feature suggestions won’t be based of real world use cases

2) If you have a user base that is passionate about your product then they would be more than glad to help you improve it by beta testing. Think how often an article is written offering hundreds of invites and how quickly they are all gone. A website like InviteShare wouldn’t exist if the willingness if users to beta test wasn’t there. Essentially, you are trying to charge companies for what they can already do for free. However, this applies to product which inspire passion… you can’t convince users to beta test boring work-related products quite as easily so the market opportunity is still there!

Steve Shapiro
http://www.digsby.com
(launch +4 days and counting)

A Payoneer MasterCard is required to receive payment.
There is a $10 activation fee for the card.

People know which is spam. Do you know which one is SPAM?

Than write something real…

is anyone else seeing a new techcrunch format that looks horrible?

[COMMENTS]
[BLOG POST]
[new version of crunchbase]
[REPLY BOX]

Having Project Managed many software projects including very large video games in my time, I know that one tester is not equal to the next!

There’s a BIG difference between:

“The green monster is broken. Please fix”

and

“In room 2722, the 7th boss monster (green) runs through the wall at 270,112,300 when the player presses up&left together after picking up the sword in room 2721. (does not happen if the user collects the shield in room 111). Attempted 10 times. 80% repeatable”

The first bug is completely useless - it wastes the time of an experienced, and very busy, very tired, and very expensive, developer, but the 2nd bug write-up gets the bug fixed quickly and easily.

So - my question to the utest.com team is, ‘how are you going to train your testers to write ‘good’ bugs’?

Man this website looks mess up in Firefox browser. They called themselves professionals. LOL…. I see Techcrunch kiddie website. No joke. I could grab whole screen and send it.

I hope they open Firefox browser for windows XP. I see screw up screen.

Nice catch, Paul @ #8! It’s just a credit-card affiliate scheme?

Sorry for the page bugs, everyone. We’re still ironing issues out with the new CrunchBase widget, which has been taken out for now.

So what if its an affiliate scheme? They gotta make money somehow. Focus on the service. SERVICE SERVICE SERVICE.

They may want to reconsider using the Mastercard for payment. It’s sketchly (monthly fees apply) and comes of unprofessional. If they want serious coders (who make really good testers), they need to link up with automatic deposits. I don’t know what the payments will be yet (I don’t see any bugs listed on the site), but I’d need to see more then cheeseburger money to make it worthwhile. We shall see.

Not only is there a $10 activation fee, but there is a monthly service charge, a fee for every ATM transaction, and every other possible way to nickel-and-dime you to death. I got as far as reading the MasterCard terms of service, and then bailed out. The crowdsourcing of software testing is an excellent idea for a business model, but these guys got greedy by forcing the rip-off MasterCard on their testers.

Using a system like this, I think a lot of the obvious bugs will get caught.

That being said, its the not so obvious ones that will go undetected for the most part. Unless companies provide crystal clear use cases, expected results, and so on, its very difficult for someone with little experience with the software to correctly test it.

The quality of the results produced by uTest will be based on the company using the service, not the testers.

http://www.adammcnamara.com

Quality of testers… I stopped testing for Microsoft several years ago (i started testing on Win95 - server 2003) the quality of testers Microsoft has is crap, utest will be about the same. 30% (or less) of the testers will catch 95% of the bugs, while the rest sit around and play with new software toys and call themselves beta testers.

Seems to me like a good idea especially if you would like to do the testing. However, I think the site needs an FAQ like page to answer some of the questions that testers may have esp. this $10 activation page etc.

Tippo (#20), no FAQ is required to explain the Mastercard details, they need to do away with that form of payment and get serious about finding good people for testing–those who would require direct deposit.

Chumps-

All of you are guessing! No one will know how it performs until it is actually tried. The results will vary from project to project.
Is this a magic bullet that is going to make all software bug-free? No, I don’t think so. All you professional QA people can breathe a sigh of relief.

To the point about 30% of the testers finding most of the bugs — who cares if you are paying on a per bug basis?

There are some genius level testers out there. Some of these guys are going to pull out their special secret sauce tool-kits. All you need is one genius to find the hidden bugs that others won’t. Frankly, their success comes down to finding some top notch QA ninjas…..

Personally, I like the brute force attempt to find bugs. There is no way that one team of QA people can be creative enough to find all bugs…. it just isn’t going to happen.
The more minds to solve a problem, the better….

It somewhat reminds me of Digg…. all they need are some hard core members to sustain the entire business.
However, one thing is different from Digg, these guys are actually being paid for their time! Utest is actually distributing the revenue with the people doing the work. That’s more than I can say for 99% of social sites that want me to give them money.

Krgrds,
E. David Zotter

P.S. I was able to register without a cost for the debit card…..

>> I’d need to see more then cheeseburger money to make it worthwhile

Then you must be rich.

I wonder what a cheesburger costs in Brazil, Russia, China, or India?

#23, I gather you always go the “cheap” route. Please do tell us what software you do this with, so we can avoid it.

#22 — I would have been able to *register* free, too. I hope you read the *second* set of Terms and Conditions — the one from Payoneer. That’s where the fees for using your “free” card are documented.

Why didn’t they just use Paypal? Seems like a horrible business model to try and scam/sucker the testers into this credit card thing when they really are the lifeblood of the business.

What’s worse is that the product isn’t even active yet. After sign up you can’t login and you’re met with a splash screen saying that service providers haven’t been populated it.

This is the new wave of beta spam where individuals who are used to signing up for any beta are going to end up gettting reamed by farce companies such as uTest…. who’s sole business model is to collect and sell personal data.

http://xrrg.com/x/r/utest-baited-farce/

Reading their blog answers a few questions: http://blog.utest.com/

They have highlighted the first 10 companies that will recruit testers - testing opportunities will not arrive for another few weeks according to their blog.

I think they would get more serious users (the ones who read T&Cs and TOS) if they dropped the credit card scheme. I think their gain in affiliate profits is not worth deterring so many observant techies.

I just realized you can sign up for the card AFTER you have made some money. Why not see how far you get and sign up if it is worth it?

I was duped into signing up for uTest (didn’t signup for Payoneer though). the software that they displayed for upcoming tests are known spyware ridden software. That and the whois for payoneer.com shows names servers in Israel. Makes you wonder about it being a scam or a ruse to steal users identities.

utest responds to the scam accusation:
http://blog.utest.com/?p=17

they say they will pay the activation fee, but not the atm fees.

Spyware and mastercard scams aside, the ‘pay the mob’ approach to testing still seems to fall flat on its face. Notice the word “beta” baked into most of the logos on freshly launched sites these days? It’s de rigueur for Web 2.X sites to launch in beta and ‘harness the mob’, yeah, for frees.

On the other hand, if there WAS a, on-demand source for high-talent (testing web applications specifically) testers available how much would it be worth to you?

“Pay Per Bug” business model sounds exciting, the truth is testers and the QA company will get rich, customers will end up paying a lot more for the QA cost.

You will see bunch of nonsense bugs, which are totally unnecessary. Testers write up these bugs as place holders for $$$money$$$. A simple problem will be written in 10 different reports as 10 different bugs.

This will cause developers and project managers spending a lot more time in reading through all the reports. At the end you will see lots of bugs being found but not all are necessary to be real bugs. This will eventually lead to more time, more money and more efforts in getting the project done.

I’d definitely not use such service. When I pick a QA vendor to do testing, I will look into the way how they handle project secrecy, whether they enforce NDA (non-disclosure agreement) or not. If they have these random testers around the world to do the test, it is most likely the secrecy of my web site or product will be wide spread within seconds.

If “Pay per bug” works, then I can start a programming company and offer “Pay per line of code”.

“Pay per bug” just doesn’t encourage honesty and professionalism in QA business. At the end what matter is the quality of work and not the quantity of work.

Be careful with their payment option (the way they pay a tester). They ask you to complete a pre-paid credit card applicaiton. There’s a $3 per month fee included in the fine print of the application and they do ask for your SSN. It all looks legit and you can opt to complete the application later but beware of the hidden fees.

Holy negativity… since when did TechCrunch crowd become such naysayers and know-it-alls? Oh wait….

Interesting discussion on ‘Pay per bug’ is going here. Certainly I can say that future of Pay per bug is bright in spite of few obstacles.

I have written a comprehensive study post on Pay per post on below page:

http://www.softwaretestinghelp.....r-of-bugs/

i.e. Should companies charge the clients on the basis of number of bugs?

In comment section of this post some QA expertises have pointed out problems with this model and also suggested some good solutions.

Finally it’s a brilliant idea. Just need to shape up little bit to fit for use.

Definitely feel duped over their payolla scam…I mean Payoneer scam. Kind of a Qtrax like mistake that will be sending them to the dead pool before they get started, and even faster if the apps to test are riddled with spyware.

Should be removed from the Crunchbase as a scam site.

With the software evolution, to offer to their users more features and become compatible with the most popular operative systems, some software applications tend to have hidden bugs. Imagine if you are Bill Gates, and you want to know if the last version of Word contains bugs! Microsoft and other companies uses the power of their community to test their software (and of course report bugs) and in exchange the testers will receive a discount, money or a software application. [...]

http://blog.belive.ws/2008/02/.....community/

Regards,
Adriano Lopes

I’ve done pay-per-bug testing. This is what happens.

1) A quality software developer that creates very high quality large sites/apps. If it takes a 100 man hours to thoroughly vet the site/app, and only a handful of bugs are found, how is that at all cost effective for the tester? This software developer wouldn’t find anyone to test their site/app after a few tries with utest.

2) A utest tester considers something a bug. The developer considers it a feature/by design. It isn’t just a disagreement, it’s a matter of money. With a pay per bug model, this common scenario necessarily results in someone losing not just an argument, but money. Any sound business model would necessarily pass judgment on the side of the developer. How many times will a tester be burned by this scenario before refusing to play any more?

3) Critical bugs are usually not stumbled upon quickly, but rooted out after hours of serious testing, with no guarantee that a big bug will be discovered in the end. If I’m being paid per bug, it isn’t worth the risk of not finding a bug to go about conducting any major tests. I’ll instead go for quantity of bugs, which means my testing will be quick an superficial. Finding seven $5 bugs in an hour is a safer bet than finding one $35 bug in an hour.

Beta testing is nothing new in this industry, but there are two different types of beta testing - public beta testing and selective beta testing.

Software companies who have huge influence like Microsoft may attract users out there to pay for a pre-release version of the product just to try out, like the launch of Win XP, they called it “release candidate preview”. So they didn’t even need to pay people out there to test their software, users were actually willing to pay for an incomplete product and perform free testing for Microsoft. But not everyone would report bugs back to Microsoft.

Most companies who go through public beta testing are in the purposes of gathering usability and other compatibility data. They usually don’t have big budget to pay for pubic beta testers. And these beta testing programs are usually arranged by their in house QA department just to save cost. Users can download their beta product from their web site, install and try out.

There are companies who would like to keep their products’ secrecy until the final release, and they will definitely not letting the public to get hands on it. Like those video game companies, they will select individual from a public pool for play testing their games. The beta stage testing will be monitored closely and carefully. Most of these beta testers will be required to sign NDA and other document before they can put their hands on the product.

Seasoned Tester and BuGMan said it for me.

I suspect that a lot of the 1.8 Million will be going as seed money
to subsidize testers for what most companies should consider a
dubious proposal.

I don’t agree with comment number 7. Have you looked at some of the software we will be testing? Some of it is software we can actually BE users of. Therefore we CAN be the best actual testers out there. Actually MOST of it is software we can actually be users of. That’s the idea behind all this. We can use it, test it. Report the bugs and unlike other times where we report bugs to companies and get NO compensation we will be compensated when we report a new bug. I see no problems with this. Gives me a chance to try new software, get the kinks out of it, give my opinions AND earn some money while doing it. It’s a win/win situation.

Way to go U-Test!

My only question is: When do we actually start???