uTest, which provides software developers with a variety of testing services for their Web, desktop and mobile applications, has raised $17 million in Series D funding in a round led by QuestMark Partners. The new capital will be used to launch new tools to aid developers, and to open more offices in the United States – namely Seattle, Chicago, Los Angeles and Dallas (for starters).
QuestMark co-invested with earlier uTest backers Scale Venture Partners, Longworth Venture Partners, Egan-Managed Capital and Mesco, at double the valuation of the company’s $13 million Series C round. The startup has secured more than $37 million since its inception in 2007. → Read More
Software testing marketplace uTest has raised $13 million in new funding led by Scale Venture Partners with participation from the startup’s existing investors, including Longworth Venture Partners and Egan-Managed Capital. This brings the company’s total funding up to $20 million. According to a release, this round of funding brought a “significant increase in uTest’s valuation.”
UTest allows companies to outsource their QA testing to ‘the cloud.’ The company provides on-demand testing services through its community of 30,000+ professional testers from more than 160 countries around the world. → Read More
Software testing marketplace uTest today announced the results of its so-called “TV Networks Bug Battle” competition. More than 500 software professionals from 30 countries around the world participated in the quarterly competition, reporting a total of 908 technical, functional and GUI bugs in the web and mobile apps of NBC, CBS, Fox and ABC.
Testers were challenged to search the sites for bugs – performing a combination of exploratory, functional and usability testing. → Read More
uTest, a startup that allows companies to outsource their QA testing to ‘the cloud’ has just concluded its latest quarterly bug battle, during which it put some of the world’s largest social networks to the test. Hundreds of participants (many of which have been involved in product testing for over a year) did their best to uncover flaws across Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn, with $3,000 up for grabs for the testers who identified the most crucial bugs.
Below are the final results for the number of bugs found. It’s worth noting that this data is prone to bias and may well overstate the number of ‘showstopping bugs’ (testers probably had a strong incentive to rate their bugs as ‘showstopper’ so as to have a better chance at the prize). But it also meshes fairly well with anecdotal experience. → Read More
uTest, the crowdsourcing QA startup that lets companies rely on external developers to help them identify bugs, has closed a $5 million Series B funding round led by Longworth Venture Partners and Egan-Managed Capital, along with existing investors Mesco Ltd. and Massachusetts Technology Development Corp. The new round brings the startup’s total funding to around $7.8 million after a $2.3 million Series A round last year and some early seed funding.
The site offers customers a web based platform and tools for monitoring testing and QA cycles, which are available to them free of charge (they only pay for the testing completed by the crowdsourced community). Community members are paid depending on the number and type of bugs they find, and the marketprice for bug finds fluctuates depending on the number of bugs left to find, the demand for testers, and other criteria. Since launching in Febuary, the uTest community has grown to 11,000 users. → Read More
It’s open bug hunting season over at uTest which is rolling out its QA marketplace and community. The startup is trying a crowdsourcing approach to testing software bugs. Anyone can sign up to test software and make some cash. uTest estimates that its testers will be able to rake in anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars per month, depending on tester-expertise and bug pricing. It is important to note that bug prices will fluctuate in real-time based on a variety of parameters, including: Bug type (logical, GUI), type of application (Web, desktop), number of testers that fit the required profile for the testing environment, bugs left to find, and more. Over 2000 testers from around the world have already signed-up, so it seems the company’s pay-per-bug model is resonating well across testing professionals. CrunchBase Information uTest Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Boston-based uTest has raised $1.7M to bring to market a crowd-sourced quality assurance (QA) marketplace and community. The service has begun recruiting testers in anticipation of its official launch, expected in early 2008. No fuzzy logic here; uTest presents clear and communicable value propositions: For companies in need of QA, uTest is providing an on-demand environment for the management of full testing cycles. For testers, uTest is providing an oDesk-like marketplace through which they can be hired and paid on a Pay-per-Bug basis. The company’s founders recognized that QA and usability testing solutions are inefficient. QA departments are either under-utilized when waiting for versions to test, or over-extended when a new version comes out. To most SMBs, QA outsourcing is neither cost effective nor available “on-demand”. Then, of course, there are cost-cutting measures that leave companies unable to sufficiently fund QA efforts, ultimately shipping buggy applications to users like us. The uTest testing platform itself is entirely Web-based and provides the management of complete QA cycles, from creating/loading test scripts, to selecting the target community (profile and environment) of testers required. The platform also provides test case management tools, real-time information on bugs and defects logged, statistical information on release maturity level, as well as QA coverage and market readiness. Support for bug tracking systems includes Bugzilla, Jira, FogBugs and will be expanded over time. In a smart business move, uTest will not charge companies to use their platform to manage testing and QA cycles—this will be entirely free of charge. uTest will only charge for the services provided by the community of testers. The uTest offering makes a lot of sense to me and I expect it will be warmly embraced for several reasons. First, consider for a moment that for many SMBs, QA management solutions such as those offered by Mercury or IBM-Rational are beyond their reach. Speaking from personal experience, the majority of the testing cycles I’ve seen have been “managed” on Word or Excel. The “on-demand” model which has been proven time and time again on the Web from CRM to ERP, should work just as well for QA. The fact that the platform will be offered free of charge, pushes the offering to “no-brainer land”. Second, beyond the manageability aspects of uTest’s service, companies will obviously enjoy the cost saving aspects of paying testers by the bug. It’s this aspect that in my opinion will → Read More
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