Software Testing Blog

A quick update on the latest uTest Bug Battle. We’re five days into the competition, which is comparing four of the world’s top job sites: Monster, CareerBuilder, Indeed and SimplyHired.

With just under seven days remaining, we’ve already had more than 300 testers participate and well over 400 bugs reported. Although the quantity is impressive, we’re even happier with the quality of bugs being reported. These sites are very feature rich, so we expect more of the same as the competition progresses.

Remember, the Bug Battle ends Monday, August 16th at noon ET, and there is nearly $4,000 in prize money at stake. It’s not too late to win the top prize, so log into your uTest account and get cracking.

For a primer on how to win the Bug Battle – especially the usability part of the competition – we highly recommend Santhosh Tuppad’s latest blog post. You can also find tips in the uTest Forums.

Good luck the rest of the way!

By now, readers of our blog and newsletters are aware of our interest obsession with all species of software bugs. Whether it’s a funny error message, a fatal security flaw, or a glitch that prevents raw sewage from being treated, we’re always happy to hear about the “showstoppers” encountered by everyday users.

With that in mind, we’ve decided to launch a monthly contest titled….wait for it….Bug of the Month! Here are the basics:

• Start date: Mon, Aug 9^th
• End date: Sun, Aug 29^th
• Where: on uTest’s Facebook page
• Prize: a shiny new iPod Touch

And here’s how you play:

• Step One: “Like” uTest on Facebook
• Step Two: Find your favorite bug or error message (funny/scary/annoying) from any piece of software – websites, mobile apps, printers, etc.
• Step Three: Upload your screenshot or video to uTest’s Facebook wall
• Step Four: Tell your friends, family and colleagues to “Like” your bug

Whoever gets the most “Likes” by the end of the month wins the iPod touch. Easy enough?

Remember, this isn’t like the Bug Battle – you DO NOT have to report these bugs through the uTest platform, you DO NOT have to document the type/frequency/severity, and you DO NOT have to be the person who originally discovered the bug.  This is a public contest and the most popular bug wins!

So if you’ve seen a software bug that you feel is worthy of this honor, visit our Facebook page and get started.

The latest uTest Bug Battle is officially underway! As mentioned a few days back, the focus of this quarter’s competition will be on four of the world’s prominent career sites. So for the next 10 days, testers from around the world will be searching Monster, CareerBuilder, SimplyHired and Indeed for the most compelling bugs – and reporting in our online platform.

With the high unemployment numbers making headlines (and with Labor Day right around the corner) we were curious to find out which site would be the most helpful for those in search of work. In other words, which site has the best feature set? The easiest sign-up process? The most accurate search results?

That’s for our community to decide. Once the testing phase of the competition is over on August 16 at noon, we’ll be sending a survey to all participating testers to compare the usability and feature set of these four applications.

Why should you participate? Well, bragging rights, for one. But we’ll also be awarding nearly $4,000 in prize money to the testers who report the most interesting bugs and provide the most insightful survey feedback.

So what are you waiting for? Log into your uTest account, scour these apps for defects and report them in a clear, concise manner. And if you do it better than your peers, you could be named the Q3 Bug Battle winner and earn some big prize money for your time.

Need some pointers? This uTest Forums thread will show you how to increase your odds of winning.

Have more questions? Learn more about the Bug Battle basics.

Good luck!

Wondering how you can stand out from the crowd in this quarter’s Bug Battle? Santhosh Tuppad – a “Gold” tester and three-time Bug Battle winner – has some tips to help you claim your share of the prize money, including advice on logging bugs, bug-hunting strategies, submitting positive feedback and more.

For more on Santhosh, read his Tester Spotlight or his recent guest blog post. For more on the current Bug Battle, start here.

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I have participated in three uTest Bug Battles so far. In this blog post, I will share with you my experiences from the Q2 competition this past May, and how I was able to win first place. This will include the types of things I concentrated on, my strategy, and how others can give themselves a better chance to succeed in the Bug Battle, as well as in the greater uTest community. Let’s get started!

Different quality criteria bugs

Bug Battles are organized to help uTest understand who is skilled and to whom they can assign more projects or invite to the projects. So, this is a good opportunity for those testers who are new, as well as who are old. Unfortunately, most of them do not understand what the Bug Battle is about – they just understand that “Hunting bugs and reporting them would make them win.”

So, in Bug Battles I report bugs on different quality criteria like:

1. Usability
2. Functionality
3. Severity
4. Performance [ Out of scope for Bug Battle ]

The above list goes on. I do not report 20 usability issues but 20 issues across different quality criteria. By doing this, it gives a good visibility to the Project Managers of uTest and helps them in understanding the credibility of a uTester. So, Project Managers add them to their list to invite these testers to projects.

Read more…

Riddle: Some people have them, others are looking for them and every politician running for office has a plan to create them by the millions. What are they?

Answer: Jobs of course! With the official unemployment rate hovering around 10% here in the states, discussions of economic recovery eventually come down to jobs. While the pundits argue on the best way to create more,  the unemployed are left to scour the internet for quality employment opportunities.

But where do they look exactly? Which are the best job-searching sites out there? Which are the easiest to navigate? Which ones have the most robust feature set? Which ones have the best iPhone, Android and BlackBerry apps? Most important of all: Which ones have the most bugs?

To answer these questions, we’ve decided to make job sites the subject of this quarter’s uTest Bug Battle competition. There were many good ones to choose from, but we ended up going with the big guys: Monster, CareerBuilder, Indeed and SimplyHired.

The Bug Battle gets started this Friday, August 6 at noon (ET). Testers will be given ten days (until Monday, August 16 at noon) to search these applications 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 Top Tester, Best Bug, Best Survey Feedback, Best Mobile Bug and a bunch of other categories.

More details on this Bug Battle – as well the rules, prizes and deadlines –can be found in this uTest Forums thread. Of course, we’ll be providing frequent updates via our blog, forums and newsletters.

Special note: This competition is available ONLY to members of the uTest community. Not a member yet? Find out more about the benefits of joining uTest.

Salon writer Ray Bradbury once remarked that, “Video games are a waste of time for men with nothing else to do.” To which rapper Ice-T retorted, “Don’t hate the player, hate the game.”

Turns out that both observations were horribly wrong. People love the game – video games, that is – and they’re not just for men with nothing else to do, but also for women and children. And software testers.

This got us thinking (and arguing) internally about which games are best.  So we asked our tester community and our Facebook fans to tell us what genre of video game is their favorite as part of our weekly ‘What Do uThink’ polls. Here are the results from the the professional testers in the uTest Forums:

• Sports (ex. Madden Football, NBA Live, World Cup) – 26%
• Strategy(ex. Suduko, Poker) – 21%
• Action (ex. Call of Duty, Halo) – 14%
• Social Media (ex. Farmville, Mafia Wars) – 10%
• Adventure (ex. Mario, Zelda) - 10%
• Other - 7%
• Music (ex. Guitar Hero, Tap Tap Revenge) - 5%
• Role Playing (ex. The SIMS, Second Life) – 5%
• I don’t play video games…they’re for children – 2%

This blogger is very much in the camp of sports games, having broken shattered virtually every NFL record with Drew Bledsoe and the Pats in Madden 97 for PS1. You want some of this? I didn’t think so.

Our Facebook poll results differed slightly, as Action came in first with 33% of the vote. Rounding out the totals were Sports (19%); Role Playing (14%); Strategy (10%) and Social Media (5%). Interestingly, 10% fell into the ‘I don’t play video games, they are for children” crowd. Maybe Ice and Ray had a point after all.

Read more…

If you love video games, you’ve probably felt the excitement around the launch of StarCraft II – the long awaited sequel to the classic real time strategy game StarCraft. With over 1.5 million copies sold in the first 48 hours after launching, StarCraft II is on its way to becoming a hit video game. Yet like most new video games just released into the market, StarCraft II has its share of bugs and issues. For example, it overheats graphics cards and causes system crashes.

Wait, since when can software break modern hardware, and shouldn’t there be some kind of protection in place to keep that from happening? The answer is “yes,”  and despite all the protections that do exist in a modern computer, StarCraft II can still overheat a graphics card.

To understand why, you first have to understand how video games render visuals. Over and over, many times per second, a game scene is processed and then displayed to the monitor. Once the game exceeds a certain number of display updates, or “frames,” in a given second, your brain stops seeing rapidly changing pictures and starts seeing animation. The faster your hardware, the more frames you can show per second (a term called framerate). The more frames you can show, the smoother the animation.

Read more…

The good folks over at Software Test Professionals want to remind you about a very important election this Fall. No, we’re not talking about the U.S. Congress. And no, we’re not referring to American Idol either (at least not in this post).  Instead, we’re talking about something lasting and meaningful: the 1st Annual Luminary Award.

As described on their award page, this honor will “recognize a person in the software testing and quality community, who inspires others and dedicates their career to industry advancement.” The organizers were looking for someone who has dedicated their career to the betterment of software testing and quality; who has shown exceptional leadership and who has educated, promoted and published on behalf of the industry. In other words, a software testing luminary.

With that type of criteria in mind, we’re not surprised to see Cem Kaner, James Bach and Jerry Weinberg as this year’s finalists. You may know Kaner and Bach from our recent Testing the Limits interviews (Jerry, if you’re reading this, we’d love to have you as a guest as well). But in case you’re unfamiliar with these testing giants, here are clips from their award bios:

Read more…

A number of years ago, I took a tour of a plate glass factory. Plate glass manufacturing is pretty simple: dirt pours in one end of a factory where it’s melted in a huge furnace. The melted dirt is then poured out as a thin sheet which then cools into glass as it rolls along a mile-long conveyor belt. The process is continuous – dirt constantly pours in and glass constantly flows out in a never ending ribbon. At the very end of the factory, away from the furnace, a lonely robot slices the ribbon into panes of glass for things like windows and doors.

Periodically, a technician will take one of those glass panes back to a lab where it is broken up, melted, dissolved with chemicals, and analyzed in fine detail under a microscope. That technician is a tester – one who is testing the production of the glass to make sure it matches quality requirements. His job is very different from that of a software tester, but surprisingly there are many things a software tester can learn from him.

That may sound bizarre because software isn’t manufactured. There is no real “production” in software – every copy of an application should be exactly the same. But production testing is about more than manufacturing. It’s about managing variability – and understanding variability should be incredibly important to software testers.

Read more…

We’ve heard all about the iPhone 4’s Antennagate and Jobs’ blaming demoing how “the death grip” causes reception issues on most smartphones. So we thought we’d check in with the uTest community for last week’s What Do uThink? poll to ask them if they — after all the media thrashing — would still buy an iPhone 4.

The results? More than half of respondents (51%) remain skeptical, choosing “No. Seems like a serious problem;” however, nearly 40% selected “Yes. I would still consider buying one,” with 10% still “Unsure.”

Our off-the-cuff survey jives with UK-based research group Opinium’s poll which questioned consumers about how they felt about the iPhone 4. A notable 57% said that they now have no intention of buying one.

While competitors have taken the opportunity to take serious jabs at the new iPhone — including the latest and greatest Droid X putting out full page ad’s with headlines reading, “No Jacket Required” (see Computerworld article) — it still looks like iPhone enthusiasts are holding strong.

According to a survey by The Yankee Group, most people who have an iPhone are very happy with the service they get from AT&T. The Yankee Group’s survey elicited positive responses from 73% of iPhone users.

So, while the iPhone 4’s antenna issues may have shaken up some consumers, Apple fanboys (and girls ) are not going to give up that easily. And, lastly, I have to ask: What Do uThink?