uTest, the crowdsourcing QA startup that lets companies rely on external developers to help them identify bugs, has closed a $5 million Series B funding round led by Longworth Venture Partners and Egan-Managed Capital, along with existing investors Mesco Ltd. and Massachusetts Technology Development Corp. The new round brings the startup’s total funding to around $7.8 million after a $2.3 million Series A round last year and some early seed funding.
The site offers customers a web based platform and tools for monitoring testing and QA cycles, which are available to them free of charge (they only pay for the testing completed by the crowdsourced community). Community members are paid depending on the number and type of bugs they find, and the marketprice for bug finds fluctuates depending on the number of bugs left to find, the demand for testers, and other criteria. Since launching in Febuary, the uTest community has grown to 11,000 users.
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I’m guessing it’s blackbox testing?
Reading this (Not positive I should celebrate … if I were clever I’d make some witty play on words using crowd-sourcing and exploitation) I can help thinking Mozilla missed something.
I don’t know the MySQL project form inside so I can’t say, but I know for a fact that Firefox is the product of a lot of crowd-sourced bug-squashing.
s/ can help / can’t help
kinda interesting the company idea , but you all know we can find guys from india to find bugs or whatever for $2 per hour.
anyway good for the company finding someone to fund
uTest is a good idea.
And I have also been a uTest tester….but not anymore.
The problem was that it was just too hard to compete with countries like India who organize groups to test the available products. This means that you as an individual have to be super quick to find the bugs before they do. It is just too stressful compared to the reward.
couldn’t agree more with you..to clear my point
Eventually, everything u do will be in competition. You better become smart with your finance because retailing, manufacturing, software design, software programming, business management, etc. are subjected to severe competition that is neither in your control or there’s. People will always seek what is best for them and they will compete against you whatever market you will be in.
Deal with it!
You’re definitely right that it’s a highly responsive community and bugs do get found quickly. We have nearly 12,000 testers from 148 different countries, covering the full spectrum of nationalities, languages and technical environments.
It’s important to note that each customer chooses the profile of testers with whom they want to engage, and can build their virtual QA team to fit their needs.
Brilliant concept. Congrats Doron and Roy.
its a good idea, i see they have 12k testers if just a 1/4 of those hammer loose on a site its like dos attack?
ofcourse its a great stress-test aswell.
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Caution: you get what you pay for. In this case you pay for bugs (according to their FAQ), and you will probably get bugs. I would prefer to get user scenarios tested from start to finish.
utest is doing the test
Neat concept, but as a potential customer I was turned off when I wanted to watch their video demo and it was hidden behind a form requiring among other things email address and my phone number. fail.
You can get to the demo wihout filling out the form, but it’s definitely something they should make easier.
http://www.utest.com/watch_our_demo.htm
But I have to open up my source code to the entire world to make this possible, right?
For behavioral testing (OS / browser / language / antivirus compatibility, etc), you don’t need to share your source. For more in-depth testing, you could choose to share source code within the uTest platform and only to those testers you have selected.
So uTest gives you complete control over the type & depth of testing you want, as well as which individual testers can review your app. You can view the profiles (location, language skills, technical environment, etc), as well as the past performance ratings of these testers.
Why does utest require a $2000 minimum starting credit???
Love the article … crowd sourcing rules and is a extremely viable solution to many testing situations.
“The true undiscovered frontier of crowdsourcing will likely be the mobile platform.”
… enter http://www.mob4hire.com. “Crowd Sourced Mobile Application Testing” Over 1,600 handsets on over 170 carriers in 75+ countries. We’re especially handy for mobile developer networks … google for our O2 Litmus press release.
Check out our site: http://www.mob4hire.com
Blog: http://www.mob4hire.blogspot.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/mob4hire
Thanks for readin’!
Stephen King
CEO, Mob4Hire.com