Software Test & Performance Collaborative

Interviewed on uTest

By Matthew Heusser on November 30, 2009 | 2 comments.

I had the pleasure of meeting Matt Johnston of uTest at October’s Software Test and Performance Conference. Matt is a Calvin College Graduate – the school where I teach Information Systems part-time. Go knights! Really neat announcements about software testing and Calvin to come in the next sixty days.

uTest is an interesting company with a unique business model. Companies put a modest pile of money on a table, uTest takes some of it, then organized a tester bug-hunt and disburses the money to it’s army of crowdsourced testers.

I’m not claiming that companies can use uTest to solve all their testing problem. The testers you get won’t be able to count on uTest as a day job, so they’ll test on nights and weekends, for the fun of it, for the professional growth, and, maybe, for a couple bucks. If the testing requires subject matter expertise; for example, if you are testing software designed to aid in managing venture-capital backed initial public stock offerings – well, it is unlikely uTest will find the deep business-process bugs.

But that’s ok; it means uTest can work as a test augmentor, providing yet another lever to help with testing. Throw $5K into a pot, hand it to uTest, and get a bunch of bug reports back. If you’ve ever tried to organize and run a beta program that got meaningful feedback from your users in less than two months, I’d say $5K and a weekend looks like a pretty good deal.

Anyway, Matt suggested we do an interview, which they have just posted. I hope you enjoy it.