12 March 2012, 14:02 p.m.
But what if the ‘undefined’ public is actually a well-shaped and defined body? The body can stay anonymous, but its members could share the same baseline skills.
Define your crowd as a lobby of people who share the same talent, and you can seriously leverage the power of crowdsourcing. And that’s exactly what 99tests has done. The Bangalore startup has 2500 testers at its disposal ready to service your debugging needs. Their numbers keep increasing. Last week they had 1800 of them. This town of testers has solved more than 12,000 QA issues. That’s power in numbers that delivers power to the customer.
The company’s website is simple in a Netflix kind of simplicity. Testers are awarded “prizes” for their work. On their user forum, someone asked (in January) if testers get paid money for their work. Good question. The answer has not been answered yet.
To get the word out, 99tests.com has teamed up with tools maker QASymphony to offer two contests worth $600 in real cash awards. It sounds like a lot of fun, since testers can dig and poke around on certain public websites in jazz and bluegrass music as well as city government sites of New York, San Francisco and Chicago.
The music sites include the New Orleans Jazz Festival , a bluegrass festival in San Francisco, and the ear-bleeding ruckus of Lollapalooza.
Participants must discover and report using the qTrace tool by QASymphony. qTrace is a software defect documentation and reporting tool that captures and records your screen movements as well as system information. It’s an unobtrusive thing; it just follows you and saves your annotations to PDF or Word.
Report a bug and you get to keep the qTrace tool, a $49 value.
Contestants with the highest number of severity defects submitted wins. Each validated bug will be prioritized and weighed against the criticality of fixing it. Evaluation of ranking will be done using the 99tests testing infrastructure and bug tracking system.
There will be two contests with the first starting on March 12 and the second on March 15. They are limiting the time to 48 hours and the number of entrants to 50.
To enter you need to register at www.99tests.com.
Victor Cruz is a blogger whose articles have appeared in American Venture, Cloud Tech, Cloud Computing Journal, CommPro.biz, and eSecurity Planet.