Techcrunch has a good review on software - business to business ……

Way to go U-Test!

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Regards,
Adriano Lopes

Should be removed from the Crunchbase as a scam site.

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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/

Then you must be rich.

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

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…..