DARPA: Test Our Weapons System, It’s a Blast!
You’d be hard-pressed to find a more vocal proponent of crowdsourced software testing than yours truly (uTest). Over the last few years, we’ve seen first-hand just how successful community-based testing can be with regards to functional, security, load, localization and usability testing. But what about testing military systems? Could crowdsourced testing play a role in verifying the functionality of hi-tech weapons systems?
DARPA says yes.
Here with the story is informationweek.com:
The Department of Defense wants to create computer games that will crowdsource the complex process of verifying software for weapons systems.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the DOD’s research arm, through a project called Crowd Sourced Formal Verification (CSFV), aims to provide a “fun” way for the public to take part in software verification, a software engineering process to ensure an application satisfies its requirements, according to an agency announcement posted on FedBizOpps.gov.
The way DARPA sees it, if software verification was turned into a computer game that was fun for anyone to play, it could test the properties of software on a wider audience to ensure it will achieve its desired outcomes, according to the announcement.
Of course, one could argue that what DARPA is envisioning here is not really software testing as much as it is software checking – an important distinction made by many in the field, including James Bach. Nevertheless, there’s something to be said for the most advanced military on the planet looking to leverage the crowd for more accurate, more in-the-wild testing results. And if you recall, this is not DARPA’s first foray into crowdsourcing.

In 2008, journalist Jeff Howe published
As you may have read on 



We’re kicking off a new, local chapter of the
In 2009, an ambitious
As we get closer to reaching the critical milestone of 40,000 testers in the uTest community (any day now!), we knew we’d have to find ways to scale our community programs in order to manage, vet and engage our enormous pool of expert testers and QA professionals.





