Just saw the TechCrunch post about uTest, a crowdsourcing approach to software QA. This is pure genius in my opinion. QA is always a huge bottleneck in software development projects, and nobody wants to do it. Kind of like double-checking your math homework. Unit testing helps with a lot of it, but there are always a lot of tests that simply need a human to do them, and there’s no way you can automate the test (especially with rich Web interfaces).
uTest supposedly have over 2000 testers signed up today, which is a pretty formidable workforce (depending on how many projects they’re working on). Not a bad way for somebody to make some extra coin in their spare time, and not a bad way for small business to offload their software QA process.
This strikes me as one of those painfully obvious ideas that companies should already be implementing internally. Your QA department is overstressed? Crowdsource your QA to anybody who wants to pitch in for a little extra cash (or some other kind of incentive). Even if this is only rolled out internally it would give some relief to overworked QA departments, along with exposing the product to people who may have valuable insight. If uTest has tightly wrapped up the legal end of things I can see them making a serious dent in QA departments, especially for small software shops.
