Software Testing Blog

Our launch has gone really well, and I wanted to highlight a few of the awesome news and blog articles that have been written about us and community testing:

• We appeared in The New York Times in an article titled New Service Applies Social Networking to App Testing
• Xconomy wrote about us: With uTest, U Find Software Bugs, U Save
• Mashable wrote a story about us: Global Software Testing Network uTest Opens to All
• James Whittaker at Microsoft mentioned us in his post about the future of software testing

A lot of other great sites have featured us as well, and we can hardly keep track of all the coverage.  Have a look at our uTest News page to see more.

Did we miss a good post or article?  Leave us a comment and let us know.

Good news! We’re announcing our General Availability launch today!  For the past several months, we have been working very hard on our Community Testing Platform.  Thanks to the outstanding feedback we’ve received from our customers, we have shaped uTest into the strongest testing platform possible.

Now we are making it easy for anyone to start using uTest and access the power of our testing community.  We have fully automated the process of setting up an account with uTest and starting a test cycle, making it incredibly easy for any company to benefit from community driven testing.  Some of our new features include:

• Easy Signup – Anyone can sign-up online and begin testing their software right away with a simple click of the mouse.  Just click here to get started!
• Rapid Results – Our platform will automatically assemble the perfect community based on your requirements.  Now quality testing and test feedback can come even faster than ever.
• Manage Your Own Test Cycles – We make it easy to track your testing and your application’s maturity progression.

In the coming weeks, you’ll be hearing a lot more about uTest and what we can do for customers.  To learn more about GA, have a look at our new video demo, join one of our upcoming software testing webinars, or read our General Availability press release.

uTest makes testing incredibly easy, and General Availability means the power of community testing is now open to everyone.  If you are a developer, testing your software is now easier than ever.  Click here to get started, or contact us if you have questions.

It’s a bright new day for uTest.  Happy Testing!

On Tuesday night, the uTest team gathered in downtown Boston to hang out at Mashable’s SummerMash Boston event.  We had a great time and met a lot of fantastic people.

Here are a couple of photos (click for larger):

Some of the uTest Team. From left to right: Marc Weinstein, Doron Reuveni, Roy Solomon, Stanton Champion

Mashable CEO Pete Cashmore (left) with uTest CEO Doron Reuveni (right)

Thanks to Mashable for such a great party!

Roy and I are at CAST 2008 this year in Toronto, and we’re very excited to be here.  So excited, in fact, that we’re cosponsoring a Happy Hour with our friends at Skytap. 

If you’re in Toronto for CAST, join us this afternoon from 4:30 to 6:30 at the Metropolitan Hotel on 108 Chestnut St.

Come learn about uTest and Skytap, or just to hang out and chat about testing. We’re looking forward to seeing you all!

Today is July 4th, a holiday in the United States. Right now, most Americans are outdoors playing sports, spending time with family and friends, and enjoying spectacular fireworks shows. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is at work on what is otherwise a normal Friday.

Almost no part of the world takes a vacation at the same time as everyone else, but projects must still be finished and tested. A truly global community of testers is always at work and ready, so whether it’s Independence Day in the United States, Bastille Day in France, or National Day in China, the community is writing bug reports for you to review after a long holiday weekend.

Determining when software is ready for release is one of the hardest parts of product development. Everyone involved has different criteria for “good enough”:

• Product management wants the product to satisfy minimum market expectations in a timely manner.
• Program management wants the product to meet minimum design specifications.
• Developers want the product to compile and run with as few bugs as possible.

Frequently, when we think about software testing, we stop at what the Developers want. If it compiles, runs, and the bug database is empty, then we ship it. However, the reality of product development is that the bug database is rarely empty and product management must make choices about what features live, die, and must be fixed in version 2.0.

Developing good release specifications is always a challenge, but here are a few recommendations:

1. Define release success and goals in market terms.
Identify what the market actually wants and codify all release specifications and project goals in those terms. Everyone will be working from the same playbook, so this makes it easy to make choices at a later date.

2. Communicate your goals to the entire development team.
Whether you are using agile, waterfall, or something in between, everyone should have line of sight to what the market wants. Even the most junior developer should understand why their code matters to the customer.

3. Prioritize development based on market expectations.
Do the most important parts first. Everyone wants to jump to the interesting parts of the project, but the customer’s idea of interesting may be something else entirely. Making sure valuable work gets done earlier means that the valuable parts can be tested and validated longer and better. If the project hits a snag, it may be possible to release a smaller version that still satisfies some market needs.

4. Make sure QA is on board
Don’t leave your QA team in the dark. They need to test according to the same goals as everyone else, and their bug reports should be prioritized according to the same expectations as everyone else.

5. Validate with Good Criteria
When validation is on-board with good criteria, then it’s possible for everyone else in the product development team to decide when a product is ready and when it’s not. Test results are clearly aligned with product expectations which are clearly aligned with market demand. The outcome is a product that ships on time with the features and stability the market wants.

The uTest platform features a Maturity Indicator that, when combined with good market based specifications, can readily help product development teams know when a product is really ready for release. Because our community is so large and varied, it’s possible to quickly gather a very informed consensus on the readiness of a product; something that is more difficult to gain in a traditional testing organization. Based on the test cases and user guide, the community constantly evaluates the readiness of a product, allowing a testing manager to tell at a glance how close their release is to good enough.

Having good market driven goals is the first step to successful QA, and any software company can benefit from that alone. Bringing those goals to a testing community like uTest can make assessing release readiness even easier, and that’s good for everyone.

Did you know that uTest has the power to test more than just ordinary software? This past weekend, we opened up testing of the uTest website to our community of uTesters. Incredibly, they found over 50 bugs, demonstrating a small example of the power of the uTest community! For example, we found bugs involving:

• Browser compatibility – some older browsers do not properly display our website
• Usability – many of the bugs were related to inconsistent links and layout
• Spelling & Grammar – lots of extra proof reading catches lots of little problems

If your business is like our business, you’re moving quickly and can easily forget or miss what happens on your own website. Community driven testing has the power to catch these kinds of issues, giving you feedback very quickly that you may never have received at all. With commercial websites, finding problems before your customers can make or break your marketing. What are you missing on your own website?

(Many thanks to the uTesters for their hard work! You’ve given us a lot of work to do.)

Check out our guest post on 47 Hats, a great blog devoted to Micro ISVs.  We talk about some of the reasons you might want to do crowdsourced software testing:

Thousands of people want to help you make your product better, and they’re in places around the world both near and far. Some of them may live down the street and some of them in places on the other side of the planet. They’re all part of a global crowd, ready to pitch in and contribute their knowledge and skills. The Internet makes it possible for you to connect with them, share your product, and learn from their experiences.

Crowdsourced software testing gives you access to a number of benefits:

• Access to diverse platforms, languages, and people
• Real insights from the real world, not just made up test case results
• Testing done by hundreds of people at the same time
• Rapid feedback right away

Keep reading our post about Crowdsource Testing your Application.

We’re a very social group here at uTest, and we want you to be social with us as well! Here’s a list of some of the places you can find us:

• We just created a uTest room on FriendFeed. Join us, comment away, and share your thoughts and ideas about software testing.
• On Facebook we have both a Page and a Group. Become a Fan of our Page and a Member of our Group, and you can connect with uTesters from around the world.
• You can follow us on Twitter as well. Find out the latest that’s happening with uTest and testing.
• Our uTest blog right here lists the latest things we’re doing as well as where we’re headed. We also plan on including more information that’s relevant to testers and developers alike. Feel free to tell us what you think!

Coming soon, we’re launching a new forum for our community members to join in and discuss testing both online and off. We’re looking forward to telling you more soon.

Keep an watching here and we’ll have more for you soon!

We are pleased to announce that uTest was select by the Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs (SVASE) for the “Most Promising New Company” at “Launch: Silicon Valley 2008,” which was held yesterday at Microsoft’s Silicon Valley campus.

We were thrilled to be a part of a list of very promising companies and we were very happy to win the Most Promising New Company award. We received tremendous positive feedback from the audience, press, bloggers and industry experts.

We would like to thank the audience that selected us and our customers that continue to give us tremendous support and references. Most of all, we are grateful for our community of testers who have helped make this model a fantastic success.

uTest has all the right ingredients to continue and revolutionize the testing industry with our attractive and innovative business model and our stable and scalable technology.

Like any other early stage company, we will face many challenges moving forward; but I strongly believe that the ingredients that created uTest and made it what it is in a very short time scale will continue to revolutionize software testing and improve software application quality.

As we look forward, we are very excited about our next major milestone which is General Availability at the end of July.

Best regards,

Doron Reuveni
CEO