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Crowdsourced QA service provider uTest made waves late last year when the company raised $1.7 million in funding. Nearly two months later, I got a chance to speak with uTest's CEO, Doron Reuveni, to see what the next steps would be, now that the company has launched its beta and is beginning to gain traction.
But first, a bit of background: uTest's SaaS Testing Platform allows companies to look to the community for QA services, leveraging a larger, social network of software testers and tech savvy individuals to find and report bugs within their websites. This is offered as a cost-effective alternative to creating your own team and testing on an internal level, and this also ensures that your site's official launch to the public, even if it is a beta launch, will be less reliant on actual valued users for finding and reporting bugs.
One thing I found particularly interesting about uTest's service is its pay-per-bug model that incentivizes the software testers and keeps costs low for the companies. In speaking with Reuveni, I took the opportunity to learn more about this pay-per-bug model, and the implications it held for the future of uTest itself. Could uTest's SaaS Testing Platform in fact be used as a business model for the testers?
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Reuveni explained that testers receive feedback and can gain in the rankings, just as with any other promotional network where individual users can establish themselves as authorities. To that end, the answer to my initial question was "Yes," uTest can be used as a platform for executing one's own business model as a software tester.
One social aspect of this particular feature, which is currently in development and stands as one of the upcoming options that uTest was kind enough to tell me about, is the ability for these respected software testers to create their own teams for the deployment of a full-fledged, all-out effort to find and report bugs on a project basis. The main reason I like this approach is the fact that the leading software testers will seek out other quality software testers, and can earn more money while providing better value for the company that needs QA testing.
Take this developing team model, and it can be applied to a great number of projects that can be rolled out on a variety of websites, allowing uTest to offer specialized niches within its larger network. One way in which this could become particularly helpful is for another one of its upcoming features: a Facebook application.