Software Testing Blog

To all of our US-based customers, investors, media friends and the 5,000+ testers who call America home, the whole crew at uTest wishes you a safe and happy 4th of July.

And to all of our friends from other nations, we just wish you a safe and happy Saturday!

Tonight we released the version 2.3 of the uTest platform.  There are a lot of fixes and features in this release, but we’re most excited about two new features:

Discussion Threads

Starting today, testing managers have a new tool for working with the uTest community.  With discussion threads, it’s now possible to quickly and easily create a virtual meeting room so they can communicate with their testers and the uTest project manager.

Testers who are working on a project can “meet” in real-time, ask & answer questions and share information with each other about that particular release.  And customers have a great new way to share critical information or requirements while a release is underway.

Discussion threads will enable testing managers to better manage and interact with their virtual testing teams and ultimately create even higher quality apps.

(Click to see a larger screenshot.)

Application Profiling

Another great feature we’re introducing is a tool to help testing managers better match their applications to testers expertise through refined application profiling.  When creating a new release, testing managers will have the ability to classify their application and testing needs.  Our system will use then use this information to automatically identify testers who are more likely to match the release’s exact testing needs.

The drop-down menus will allow testing managers to select:

• Application Type – Web, Desktop, Mobile
• Testing Type – Functional, Usability, or Load & Performance
• Industry Type – Social Networking, Retail, Entertainment/Gaming, Financial Services, etc.
• Audience – Consumer, Business, or Both

This matching process is just the beginning, and coming soon we will release several additional features for both testers and testing managers.  In the coming month, we will be requiring uTesters to update their profiles for even stronger project matching.

In addition to these new features, this release applied fixes to more than 40 bugs (all found by our uTester community).

Just a quick post to let you know that uTest was just named a Finalist for “Best New Company of the Year” in the 2009 American Business Awards (a.k.a. Stevies). We’re excited to be recognized by the ABA, especially since our general availability launch was just 10 short months ago!  It’s been a whirlwind run for us during that time:

• Acquired a whole slew of new customers
• Expanded into gaming and mobile app verticals
• Raised $5.2 million in a B round of funding
• Won a bunch of awards
• Launched an entirely new site with new community apps and tester-only forums
• And doubled the size of our team so we can move even faster!

But there’s no time to relax… we’re adding new customers and testers every day, and rolling out new features in our platform.  Plus, there are always more bugs to be squashed and apps to be launched!

One last note on the Stevies — More than 2,600 entries from companies of all shapes, sizes and industries were nominated in more than 40 categories. The finalists that uTest is up against  in the  “Best New Company” category are Aster Data Systems, Carpio, Evolve IP,  HubSpot, Jivox, Mazooma  and  Zuora.  The Stevie Award winners will be announced on June 22 at an event in NYC.  Shoot us a note if you’re going to be in midtown Manhattan, and we’ll see if we can set something up.

Sincere thanks again to our testers from around the globe, and to our customers for your ongoing support.

Quick update after 1 1/2 days of action from our 2nd quarter Bug Battle that’s comparing and evaluating the top six Twitter desktop apps:

1.    Tweet Deck 0.25
2.    Seesmic DESKTOP
3.    Twhirl 0.9.2
4.    Tweetr 3.4
5.    Twitterific 3.2 (mac only)
6.    Twitteroo 1.5 (pc only)

We’ve already had more than 400 testers participate and 150+ bugs, including a few verrrrry interesting defects.  The bar has been raised, but we’re looking forward to seeing what this weekend produces.

Want updated Bug Battle results? Check out the uTest on LinkedIn, our Facebook group, follow uTest on Twitter, or hit our testers-only forums.

Remember, the Bug Battle ends Wednesday, June 3rd and there’s more than $3,000 in prize money at stake.  Happy weekend and happy (bug) hunting!

Ok, maybe not exactly “proof”, but we were recently named to Gartner’s 2009 Cool Vendor list in the Application Development category.  It’s always an honor to be recognized by a thought leader and opinion-shaper like Gartner, but the even-more-pleasant surprise is that this type of acknowledgment is happening before our first birthday.

It’s further validation of the uTest model and our mission to make professional QA accessible to companies of all shapes and sizes.  And more importantly, it’s a reflection on our community and our customers who bought into the uTest concept and have helped us grow up so quickly.  Sincere thanks to everyone in the uTest universe.

The word is out!  With the launch of our revamped website, a new “Meet the Testers” application and Tester Forums, last week uTest made significant strides in turning our crowd of 16,000+ QA professionals into an interactive community.

Here’s what the media had to say:

• Jeff Howe, author of best-selling book Crowdsourcing & contributing editor at Wired Magazine, twittered the news to his 2,000 followers calling us out as a Company to Watch.

• Xconomy’s Wade Roush highlights uTest putting a human face on software testing with the new site’s collaboration tools in his story, uTest Site Revamped for Collaboration.

• VCcafe’s Eze Vidra focuses on the “Meet the Testers” app & its drill-down capabilities “into a 16K strong testing community” in uTest Puts a Face on its Crowdsourced QA Community.

Other notable posts at  StickyMinds.com, the Cloud Architect, and MSNBC.com.

Let us know what you think about the new site!

As you may have already noticed, we’ve recently had “a bit of work done”.  And by that, of course, we mean a massive, top-to-bottom redesign of all the uTest web properties (site, blog and forums).  In truth, this launch has been months in the making and required a mountain of work.  We hope you like the results.

Our goal was to revamp our brand to better reflect what uTest has become since our August 2008 launch, as well as to bring the real-world stories of our customers and our testers to the forefront.  After all, the best way to demonstrate the power of crowdsourced software testing is to let the results speak for themselves.  And our customers and testers have achieved some amazing result.

Aside from the crisp new look-and-feel, we’ve launched a much-improved uTest forums, as well a new Meet Our Testers application – an interactive global map that provides loads of information about our QA community.  But more on that in a second.

First, the new uTest homepage…

And the new tester forums…

And the global Meet Our Testers application…

Take a closer look at each country…

Of course, we utilized our QA community to test the new site, blog and forums, as well as to conduct usability testing.  This provided us a with great deal of valuable testing before we flipped the switch on this new version.

Thus far, the feedback from testers and customers has been overwhelmingly positive, but we want to hear what you think too.  Drop us a comment or shoot us a note with your thoughts.

Big buzz this week around the halls of uTest (ok, we don’t actually have halls at uTest HQ, but it does make for a pretty word picture).

Don’t get me wrong, we’ve gotten more media coverage in the last few months than most start-ups receive in their entire lifetime.  In the last month alone, uTest has been written up by such tech media stalwarts as TechCrunch, eWeek, InfoWorld, StickyMinds and TechTarget.  It’s safe to say the uTest secret is out.

And yesterday, we made our Forbes.com debut in an insightful article about starting a business during a recession.  Our fearless leader, CEO Doron Reuveni, was interviewed by author, Melanie Lindner for her piece about 10 start-ups success stories. It’s a great write-up that offers some sources of hope and practical tips for you current and future entrepreneurs.

As is the case with all of our wins — whether they’re with media, investors, awards or new customers — we know that it’s a direct reflection on the testers and customers who have helped uTest become what it is today.  And we thank you sincerely.

We’re always on the lookout for ways we can improve.  Have big ideas, small suggestions or general feedback?  Drop us a comment or shoot me an email.  We want to hear from you.

I just did my second webinar for uTest: “5 Ways to Revolutionize Your QA”.  Thanks to uTest for hosting this series on my behalf and thanks to all my testing colleagues at Microsoft who listen to my ideas enough to try them and report back the results! In this webinar are 5 insights that have proven very effective at Microsoft. I hope you find them as useful where you work.

I got a lot of great questions as a result of the webinar. Of all the concepts I introduced, the idea of ‘testing tours’ for exploratory testing seemed to resonate very well with lots of people asking for more information. I’ll work with the uTest folks to arrange the next webinar around this concept. In the meantime, uTest is supplying an e-book with a little more information about tours than what was in the webinar. There will be much more to come.

[Note: You can find both the webinar and the e-book here.]

After several months of hard work, we’re pleased to announce a brand new interface for our testing platform.  Our old interface served us well, but it was beginning to show its age.  With these new changes, we’ve gone a long way to make our platform even faster and more usable.

In particular, the new platform should be easier to use for both testing managers and uTesters.  We’ve squished a lot of our own bugs while updating the look and feel to be more consistent with the rest of our site.  We also rebuilt a lot of our codebase with a focus on making the pages load faster.

All of these improvements have another advantage: with a cleaner codebase we can develop improvements faster and easier than ever.  That means that in the coming months, you should see even more exciting improvements.

Here are a few screenshots.  You can click to enlarge them.