As the clock winds down on 2008 and before we turn our eyes toward ’09, we wanted to take a moment to wish everyone in the greater uTest community — testers, customers, investors, partners and employees — a safe and happy holiday season.
Thank you for contributing to an exciting and successful ’08. Next year will be one of great opportunity, challenge and growth for uTest. And with your help, we’ll someday look back on 2009 as a breakthrough year for all of us, as well as the beginning of mainstream adoption for community-driven software testing.
Hi uTesters – Matt Johnston here. I wanted to quickly introduce myself and let you know that I’ve joined the uTest team as VP of Marketing. Much of my background is in building and marketing marketplaces, so the uTest concept appealed to me immediately. And my first few weeks here have further raised my expectations for what we’re building together.
Anyone who’s been around software or web projects knows that testing is the end of the whip. After the scope finally stops creeping; after the developers have churned out the code; after the schedule has slipped repeatedly; it’s the testing phase that often absorbs the hit. uTest and our community enable companies to do all of the above and still release high-quality web, desktop and mobile apps on time. That’s incredibly powerful.
We’re going to have a lot of exciting stuff coming in 2009 that will attract more great customers and testing projects, as well as continuing to build our community of talented testing professionals. Stay tuned.
In the meantime, I’ll be posting on a regular basis, as well as joining our testers in the forums. If you have any ideas or feedback that you want to share with me – positive or negative – I’d love to hear it. You can drop me a comment here or email me at mattj [at] utest.com.
After a lot of judging, we are very pleased to announce the results for the first ever uTest Bug Battle!
Over 1,330 uTesters from 68 countries competed to see who could find bugs in three of the top web browsers – Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3.1 beta and Google Chrome. During their days of testing, they found a total of 672 bugs. The uTest community identified 101 of those bugs as “showstoppers,” which are defined as flaws in need of immediate attention. The final Bug Battle results included:
356 uTesters evaluated Internet Explorer 8 and found 168 bugs, including 9% that were deemed showstoppers
514 uTesters evaluated Firefox 3.1 beta and found 207 bugs, including 24% that were deemed showstoppers
461 uTesters evaluated Chrome and found 297 bugs, including 12% that were deemed showstoppers
Many of you have seen the news about The Crunchies, an award given out by the popular blog TechCrunch. We need your help and your votes – but we want to make sure you have the right reasons to support uTest! So here, in no specific order, are the top reasons to vote for uTest for The Crunchies:
1.) We have a community of over 12,000 highly professional software testers from around the world.
2.) Our product is successful! In less than a year, we’ve earned the business of over 50 customers, finding nearly 8,000 bugs.
6.) We just got $5 million in funding – meaning our financial future is secure in this time of economic uncertainty. We’re here for the long-haul.
7.) Community software testing is the future. There is no better way to discover bugs across multiple platforms, languages, and environments – all for a very cost effective price.
8.) Our customers love us. We have received truly excellent feedback about uTest, our community, and our model.
9.)The uTest platform is a great fit for agile developers and agile testing. Companies who use an agile process can submit their software to the uTest community and have quality bug reports in time to finish out their sprints.
10.) Our uTester community rocks. A Crunchie isn’t just for us – it’s for all of them. They’re real people from around the world, offering outstanding test results day in and day out.
We would appreciate your vote for The Crunchies. The process is very quick, and you can submit a new vote for us once per day. Thank you all!
Big news! We just announced a $5 million Series B funding round today from Longworth Venture Partners and Egan-Managed Capital. Our growth for the past several months has been tremendous, and with a Series B round we are now looking forward to even more exciting opportunities for 2009. The future for community driven software testing looks very bright.
[ed: We are grateful that James has posted some additional thoughts for our community following his outstanding webinar. Make sure you watch the video of his uTest webinar on The Future of Software Testing.]
Kudos to the uTest community for making my webinar so successful. From my perspective it was the questions at the end of the talk that made it so valuable. It’s good to see my opinions challenged and it’s also nice to get the pulse of such a large and engaged community.
Clearly the subject of keeping testers in test and seeing they get promoted weighs heavily on the minds of many. On my MSDN blog, this has been a hot topic, but since the idea started here at uTest, I wanted to post my larger and perhaps more controversial opinion here.
I will not mince words and I will not pander to the test hard liners. Testers are and have been treated as second class citizens in the software development industry and sitting around whining about the glass ceiling is not going to get us anywhere. What we need are two things, innovation and a mentoring system.
Innovation has been seriously lacking in software testing. The test tools that the major vendors are shipping now aren’t much different than the tools they shipped a decade ago, yet look at dev tools and there is a fundamental change in the theory and practice of how software is written. There are new languages, new IDEs, new static analyses … the pace of innovation has been brisk. Who wouldn’t want to be part of that? When are we as a testing community going to step up and match that pace of innovation? Until we do, we’ll continue to lose our best and brightest and who can blame them? Let’s up the ante with real innovation and change the face of testing so completely over the next few years, just like developers have done over the past decade. Then we may even see those same bright testing minds coming back. When the pace of our innovation pushes the quality of our software to noticeably higher levels, that’s when we’ll get noticed ourselves.
Mentoring is the next aspect of this problem. We need to take this far more seriously. There’s a quote on my MSDN blog you should read about the frustrations of one of our best testers who sees dev talent promoted faster than test talent. Why? Because there are more senior devs looking out for the junior devs. They have sponsors at higher levels in the company whose coattails they can ride and who take an active interest in their careers. At Microsoft there are fewer such senior (we call them partners) folk and that means they have to work even harder. But I don’t see them doing that. Instead, they seem to hunker down, relishing their status and trying their best to keep it. I wish they were judged on their ability to identify and promote talent instead of being judged on their ability to maintain their own position. We need stronger people at the top of this discipline that can act as representatives for the rest of us.
This uTest community can help. We are large enough and can become strong enough to act in a concerted manner to instigate, incubate and propagate real innovation and real mentoring. Together we may be able to do what our forebears could not.
James McElhiney, CTO of Second Rotation, sat down with me to talk about how they use uTest to test Gazelle.com. Gazelle is a fantastic site – they make it easy to sell or recycle your old gadgets, making the Earth a little greener in the process.
Gazelle uses an agile process with three week sprints. Towards the end of their sprint cycle, the uTester community performs agile testing over the weekend and provides results the following Monday. Gazelle’s developers are able to fix any bugs and then launch new updates.
If you would like to learn more, check out our complete Agile Testing Case Study highlighting how uTest provides outstanding software testing for Second Rotation/Gazelle.
We’re pleased to announce our next uTest webinar: The Future of Software Testing, presented by Dr. James Whittkaker. James is a Software Architect at Microsoft and a world renowned software testing expert.
For this webinar, James will be extending on his outstanding series of blog posts about the software testing of tomorrow. As one of the world’s top software testing experts, James is uniquely positioned to understand the role of testing today and how it will impact software test and development tomorrow. His vision of the future has ranged from the rise of crowdsourcing to the greater role of testers as designers.
Join us on November 20, 2008 at 1:00 PM Eastern (USA). At the conclusion of the presentation, James will be taking audience questions as well.
As an added bonus, we will be giving away ten copies of James Whittaker’s books on software testing, including How to Break Software: A Practical Guide to Testing. Anyone who attends the webinar is eligible to win! Simply sign up and make sure you attend on November 20.
The uTest Bug Battle is still running – all the way until tomorrow, November 12 at 11:59 PM Eastern Time USA. If you haven’t participated, it’s not too late! The best bug of the competition could still be out there, and you could be the one to submit it. Remember, we’re giving away almost $3,000 in cash prizes, including $1,000 to the best tester. Enter now to get started, and make sure you read the rules and regulations.
So far, we’ve received over 650 bugs – an amazing turnout for the uTester community. You guys are awesome!
I recently got Doron Reuveni, our CEO, to sit down in front of a camera and tell us a little bit about how uTest tests its own software with the uTester community.
In the beginning, we were like many other software startups where the founders do all of the software testing. In our case, Doron and Roy were the original founders and testers. But after building the initial testing community, Doron and Roy quickly engaged them to begin more in-depth testing of the uTest software testing service.
Now we use an agile process with biweekly sprints. Every other weekend, we submit our software to the community and have agile testing results by Monday morning. We use the following week for stabilization and then run a final test with the community to check for show stopper bugs.
The process works great, and testing our own software with our own platform and community gives us a tremendous amount of confidence in what uTest can do. Doron tells it best, so watch the video and get the story straight from the source.
