Software Testing Blog

Well, today he’s sticking close to home in Boston. Tomorrow he’ll land in London… and before the week is out, he’ll hit Tel Aviv.

Doron starts Wednesday morning off (after his usual 10-mile run, of course!) in London with some tea and networking with friend and colleague, James Whittaker and UK partner, TCL.

Then he’s off to QCon London, an excellent conference for the enterprise software community. On Friday, 3/12 @ 2pm, he’ll be presenting at QCon re: The Mobile App Quality Challenge & How Crowdsourcing Can Help.

Doron is one of five software testing leaders chosen to present in the “How Do You Test That?” track. This track explores unique solutions created to address situations in which automated testing does not suffice.

And on the last leg of his marathon journey, Doron will present at Garage Geeks in Israel on Monday, 3/15 @ 8pm. There, Doron will be taking a deep dive into the topic of Crowdsourcing, and how smart recruiting, training and incentives can turn an unstructured, loosely assembled mob into a unified, professional community.

So, where in the world is Doron this week?  Catch him if you can!

VentureBeat has an interesting article about eBay’s announcement that they’re going to tap into their user base to test new features — a kind of opt-in, ongoing beta program for new features.  The title for this article:

eBay to Use Crowdsourcing to Test New Features, Starting with Streamlined Search

Those who know me well know that defending the purity of the term”crowdsourcing”  against misuse is a pet cause of mine (e.g. – Meet-ups are not crowdsourcing; online polls are not crowdsourcing; asking your Twitter followers a question is not crowdsourcing). But don’t worry… this won’t be another rant about the importance of definitions and how critical labels are.  Well, at least not about the word “crowdsourcing”.

Read more…

There’s no shame in being a couch potato (every now and again). After all,the competition between the major TV networks has been extremely entertaining. But now is the time to get up off the couch and onto your desktops, laptops and smartphones – it’s time for the very first Bug Battle of 2010!

That’s right, we’re pitting the four major TV networks against each other in this quarter’s bug-hunting competition. And while there are multiple sources to find out which network has the highest rated shows, we’re going to compare their web and mobile apps to see who distributes that content best.  Here are the networks, in alphabetical order: ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC.

As an added twist, we’re introducing a mobile testing component to the Bug Battle. For more details on this – as well as info on rules and prizes – check out our Battle of the TV Networks page.

It’s now time to pull back the curtain to determine which network sites have the most bugs, the most critical bugs, and the best usability and feature set. And so uTesters, best of luck to you all as you begin another exciting bug hunting mission. May the best network win and may the top testers prevail. Good luck!

Special note: This competition is available only to members of the uTest community.  uTesters can get complete details and discuss the Bug Battle with their peers in the uTest Forums.

The major networks have been engaged in a decades-long struggle to win the hearts and minds (and eyes) of viewers. Whether it’s news, sports or sitcoms, these battles are now being fought on multiple fronts – including the distribution of their content through their web and mobile applications.

Which brings me to our latest bug-hunting competition. This quarter’s uTest Bug Battle will challenge testers to find bugs on the web AND mobile apps of the four major TV networks: CBS, NBC, ABC and FOX.

The competition gets started this Friday, February 5 at Noon (ET). At that time, testers from our community will be given one week to search these sites for the most compelling bugs, and to report them through our online platform. We’ll be dishing out nearly $4,000 in prize money for categories like Top Tester, Best Bug and Best Survey Feedback. As an added twist, we’re also including prizes for the Best Mobile Bugs.

More details on this Bug Battle – as well the rules, prizes and deadlines – after this commercial break. Just kidding, you can find them in the “Bug Battle” thread in the uTest Forums and we’ll be sharing more details here in the next few days.

So testers, you’ve got a few days to prepare for our most challenging competition to date. Until then, stay tuned.

You may have noticed that many top reporters and bloggers included “crowdsourcing” as a top trend of 2009. In fact, The New York Times named it 2009’s verb of the year!

But what will separate crowdsourcing’s winners and losers in 2010?  We believe that crowdsourcing success lies in a company’s ability to engage its community in unique and meaningful ways. These are the crowdsourcing companies that are changing the way work is done today — transforming professional services like software testing forever. But how does a company go beyond building a “mob” or a “crowd” and develop a community?

VOTE HERE to learn more about how crowdsourcing is changing the way work is done.

We’d love the opportunity to share our hard-earned keys to building a successful crowdsourcing business at this year’s Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston. But first, we need your help! (Very quick registration required.)

You can see a snapshot of uTest’s proposed presentation on the voting site. Voting opens today and closes on January 20th. As always, thanks for your continued support. All of our success stems from our amazing community!

Quick Update: If you’re posting online, #e2conf is the official tag! To track votes, click here.

Up there — it’s a bird… it’s a plane… Nope, it’s just the latest experiment to measure the ability of crowdsourcing to organize, mobilize, collaborate and compete.

DARPA (who along with Al Gore, invented the Internet), announced that it will place a large, red balloon at 10 different locations around the U.S.   The DARPA Network Challenge calls on groups to locate each of 10 red weather balloons scattered around the country — with $40,000 in prize money being awarded to the first team to accurately identify them all.

The purpose of this contest is to discover how social networking, crowdsourcing and other technologies can help accomplish a large-scale, time-critical task.  Already teams are forming, money is being spent, and the social media universe is abuzz about the competition, which launches on Saturday, December 5th.

Want to know more?  Check out what CNN, CNET, the Wall Street Journal and Scientific American have to say about the competition.

So if you see a big red orb tomorrow morning, call me!  And if nothing else, at least a Google search for the term “balloon” will return something other than another article on the plight of Balloon Boy!

Having grilled some of the top minds in the software business, this installment of Testing the Limits will deviate slightly from the norm. With us this month is John Winsor – author, entrepreneur and crowdsourcing expert.

After a successful career as a journalist and magazine publisher, John founded Radar Communications in 1998, where he implemented a variety of academic-based market intelligence tools to help some of the country’s most progressive companies learn from key voices in their communities. Today, he offers that same advice as the VP/Executive Director of Strategy and Product Innovation at Crispin, Porter + Bogusky.

John has written extensively on the subject of crowdsourcing, having published the popular 2005 book Spark: Be more Innovative through Co-Creation. With his latest book Baked In: Creating Products and Businesses That Market Themselves now hitting the shelves, John was kind enough to sit down with us to discuss the future of crowdsourcing, the premise of his new book, and the best (or worst) rock-climbing movies of all-time.

uTest: The hottest debate in crowdsourcing right now is the “fall” of traditional advertising or design firms and the “rise” of crowdsourced services. In your opinion, what does the future of crowdsourcing look like? Is the world ready for what you call the “digital tsunami?”

JW: Well the future of crowdsourcing is definitely bright, but there are still a lot of unanswered questions in people’s minds. Those who are skeptical of crowdsourcing question its ability to truly connect people. With crowdsourcing, you no longer have all of these professionals working together in the same building – that alone is often too much for some people to come to terms with. The idea of a crowd aggregating to solve business problems in a virtual environment is entirely new to most people, even though the underlying trend has been developing for years. The difference now is that it simply can’t be ignored.

uTest: So you see crowdsourcing as eventually obtaining mainstream acceptance?

JW: Absolutely. People are starting to see the full potential of this model, especially on the client side of the equation. There was a time when most people viewed crowdsourcing as chaos – like the inmates running the asylum, and that’s no longer the case for a growing number of people. So I think we’re just getting started.

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