Boston Startups: uTest – QA from the Crowd – What Else Can the Crowd Provide? July 7, 2009
Crowd sourcing, like open source software development, has been an attractive idea to me for some time, since I was full time at Black Duck Software, helping companies manage their software IP. Recently, I’ve had my eye on community and crowd powered service providers, the most talked about of which is Southborough, MA based uTest who provides crowd powered QA (quality assurance) testing.
These guys have a simple, intuitive idea that enables companies to outsource their QA testing to a crew of experienced testers, and then only pay for the bugs that are found and approved. This model makes so much sense to me – it enables companies (especially startups) to skip the step of hiring large employee bases of QA engineers who may find certain bugs, but will inevitably spend much of their time testing functionality that works.
One thing I was a little confused about with their pricing is the monthly fee that they have on their pricing page ($1,500/month for startups) – I’m not sure if this applies if a company wants to pay on a ‘per approved bug’ basis, but I assume it does. In any case, the service has attracted some big players who use their service, including Google, Microsoft, Intuit and Hubspot.
On the flip side, testers who want to get paid through the uTest portal can apply and get approved to begin working on certain project testing cycles. Once they begin finding bugs and the companies begin approving them, the testers get compensated – it’s as easy as that.
The idea of crowd sourced QA led me to thinking about other business groups that could potentially be crowd sourced – part of a marketing department perhaps – even social media marketing. Certainly development is something that has been outsourced for many years now, and crowd sourced with the advent of open source.
But imagine if a company would pay a small fee for positive criticism from tweets or Facebook wall posts that made the company look good. Then in turn, the tweeters could get compensated for doing so. It would probably cause many people to stop following the people who were tweeting about these companies, but it could potentially work. Legal is another potential service that may work in the crowd model. You need a contract? Let the crowd provide it and simply pay for what you end up using.
uTest has raised a solid base of funding ($7.8M according to CrunchBase), and appears (based on their client list, see below for some) to be doing very well. I think it’s a great model that I’d consider using to test any product. They’ve also received some great press, including this interesting post from Techcrunch where the testers from uTest did a bug comparison of the three major social network platforms at the time (LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace):
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/16/utest-bug-battle-which-social-network-is-the-buggiest/
You pose an excellent question: “what else can the crowd provide?”
My response is that many professional services can now be sourced effectively through online communities. For example, in addition to software testing services, uTest also offers usability testing for product management teams, as well as load & performance testing for IT teams. These services appeal to many companies — especially start-ups who have limited resources.
Beyond that, there are a number of crowdsourcing sites for graphic design, development and writing, including Crowdspring, Logoworks, Elance, Guru and oDesk.
Crowdsourcing has now matured beyond the b2c space (Wikipedia, Yelp, Digg) and firmly into the realm of b2b. And uTest is happy to be at the forefront of this movement. Great article… keep up the good work.
Matt J.