Software, startups, software as a service

With uTest, U Find Software Bugs, U Save

Wade Roush 8/20/08

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rejected, according to Reuveni. “The testers want to report good quality bugs and have them appproved, so they can get compensated and then get invited back for the next release,” he says. “And the companies have an incentive to approve the good bugs, because software testing is a never-ending process, and they want the good testers coming back for the next release. Nobody is looking at this as a one-off—they look at it as a relationship.”

All 24 of the companies that worked with uTest during its pilot period—including a few Boston-area firms like MocoSpace and Second Rotation—have become ongoing clients and have agreed to serve as references, Reuveni says (see the whole list here). Some of these companies are using uTest as an extension of their QA teams, while for others, uTest testers are their QA team.

Reuveni says the on-demand model works especially well for companies that use the so-called “agile” software development model, which is designed to minimize the risk that big, extended software projects will end in failure by putting applications through an entire development cycle—including planning, requirements analysis, design, coding, and testing—every week or two. “They can test with us over the weekend, and then when they come in on Monday they have a list of bugs from 30 or 40 testers, all prioritized and ready for them to work on,” says Reuveni.

Historically, 25 to 50 percent of the total budget for a software development project goes to QA testing, says Reuveni. “That’s just not an appropriate way to do things today,” Reuveni says. By outsourcing QA to uTest, companies can spend less on the process, and software engineers can focus on what they’re best at—design and coding—while leaving the dirty work to a large community of experts looking to put their software skills to work from the convenience of their homes. With uTest’s help, software companies might just get to a point where they—and not their customers—are the ones finding most bugs.

Wade Roush is Xconomy's chief correspondent. You can e-mail him at wroush@xconomy.com, call him at (617) 252-7323, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/wroush.