Utest (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
If you're a company trying to write Web or mobile software, you're probably paying people to test it before you foist your software on the general public. But rather than trying to do it yourself, you can hire a huge team of testers from around the world.
A recent example of why this matters is Apple Maps -- here is my list of its six most epic fails. Apple (AAPL) clearly had no idea about how flawed it was until people started using it. And testing out all those real-world use cases is the job of Southborough, Mass.-based uTest.
In an October 19 interview with CEO, Doron Reuveni, I learned that uTest has grown rapidly since it was founded in September 2008. Reuveni has expertise in software development and his co-founder, Roy Solomon, brought the quality assurance chops. And with the help of its employees and 60,000 bug testers working in 190 countries, uTest now has 1,500 customers.
Reuveni has a unique deal with those testers and with its corporate customers. uTest contracts with its corporate customers to ask them how they would measure a successful testing process. For example, if uTest finds a software bug that the company decides must be fixed immediately, that is far more valuable to the customer than one that goes on a bug list to be fixed in the next six months.
And those 60,000 testers -- who seek out software flaws in areas such as security, usability, and load capacity -- agree in their deal with uTest to take on the risk that they will work for days without finding such mission critical bugs. For the most part, these testers are working full-time jobs elsewhere and participate in uTest's network with an open source ethos.
There are many talented developers, for example, who are happy to invest countless hours with no cash compensation to develop open source software such as the Firefox browser or the Linux operating system because it gives them satisfaction and a chance to show off their coding chops to the broader community of developers.
So uTest's network of testers view the chance to get paid if they find an important software bug for its clients as a bonus. Meanwhile, uTest clients pay it a fee that varies depending on the size of the company from "under $30,000 a year to the high six figures," according to Reuveni.
uTest has a solid staff and good capital base -- $37 million in total from East and West coast firms -- with which to take its share of the $56 billion market for software testing. It has 110 people -- double the number at the end of 2011 and it's actively hiring more in sales and marketing, development, and community management.
uTest expects to double again in 2013 and if that keeps happening, it will be well-positioned for an IPO. Reuveni believes that uTest is growing fast because it faces no competition for what he calls "in the wild testing." Though he says, "it sounds simple, over the last four years, we have collected an amazing amount of data on past performance that we can use to run more effective test programs."
More specifically, for uTest, its rapid growth comes from "assigning the right testers to the right test projects to maximize customer value."
