uTest is a USA based company (though the founders are originally from Israel), and was recently awarded the Nutter TechnOvation Award for startups. uTest takes the massive QA outsourcing trend of the last few years, and uses it as a stepping stone to what can well be the next phase of QA evolution – crowdsource QA.

Crowdsourcing is the assignment of a task or a project to a large, usually ad-hoc group of people. A good example to crowdsourcing can be found at Threadless, which offers t-shirts that have been designed by common users. One can also think of forums as a very primitive form of crowdsourcing, as a question which was once answered by a paid expert is now "outsourced" to a crowd. Usually, however, the term applies to cases in which the service rendered by the "crowd" is more substantial.

uTest aims to harness the power of crowdsourcing to offer a new approach to quality assurance, taking the advantages of outsourcing one step further. In the last years, a growing number of organizations have completely outsourced their QA departments. Among the many advantages of outsourcing, these organizations favored the inherent freedom and flexibility in hiring focused, per-project workforce, with no strings attached. uTest now offers an even more flexible approach, which can potentially make traditional outsourcing seem sluggish in comparison.

A company or organization who signs up with uTest can assign a testing task (scaling from a focused feature test cycle to a complete project) to a large and varied community of independent testers. These testers execute the test scripts, file in their bugs and observations, and will get paid by the bug. The company earns a huge, promptly available army of testers (with no strings attached); the individual tester gets direct, immediate reward for his work – while not necessarily committing to a long project, and uTest gets a promising business model.

Besides offering a more profitable operation to companies and organizations which already incorporate QA practices, uTest offers small businesses and independent developers a once impossible way to incorporate QA into their projects. Up until now, they could only hire a full time QA workforce, paying unacceptable overhead costs, even as an outsource operation. Now, through uTest, they can incorporate short bursts of QA cycles, strategically spread through their project’s timeline, while paying almost no overhead for the intermediate periods.

uTest supports its conceptual breakthrough with unique QA management tools, which promise effective bug redundancy control and analysis, cycle management, and much more. These are supposed to overcome some of the inherent difficulties of what will sure be a diffused and massive operation.

But is this new concept completely void of problems? It is important to remember that moving from outsourcing to crowdsourcing entails similar disadvantages to moving from in-house QA to outsource QA. And just as crowdsourcing offers a more radical version of the advantages of outsourcing, the disadvantages are also much more formidable. The organization completely relinquishes control over the workforce’s skill and quality; it has no "power-testers" and "bug-aces" who are familiar with every corner of the application; and it most certainly doesn’t have people who are totally and personally committed to the project’s success.  Besides all the real drawbacks, it’s likely that the bulk of the industry will require some time to adjust to the new concept; so uTest is bound to face some skepticism from big players, at least for a while.

Having said all that, crowdsourcing does work. The skills and commitment of the crowd tend to balance themselves statistically, and since uTest’s clients only pay for results (pay-per-bug), the ROI can be quite tempting. We’ve all encountered the

At the end of the day, uTest brings a refreshing new approach to QA, one that could affect the entire industry.  While large companies and organizations may just choose uTest to beef-up their QA operations (rather than replacing them), smaller ones may indeed base their entire QA practices on uTest, as their only viable option.

But perhaps the ones who are truly going to benefit from uTest’s business model are independent testers, who can (in some sense) cut the middle-man, and finally get direct proportional reward for their work. They can cut the overhead of committing to long-lasting projects and subjecting to endless job interviews, and just work – on their own time and terms.

Interested to hear more about uTest and its new approach to crowdsource QA? Visit the uTest website for more details.