MONTREAL, Quebec. QA on Request, a Montreal-based company specialized in software testing is proud to announce the official launch of its spin-off company, the Crowdsourced Testing company. The Crowdsourced Testing company will manage the company’s crowdsourced quality assurance testing operations, while QA on Request will remain the consulting firm its clients know and love.

In October 2012, QA on Request was selected to be a part of the prestigious global accelerator Start-Up Chile. The company has since then expanded its North American operations while building a new web platform dedicated to helping web and software developers leverage the power of crowdsourcing to deliver bug-free web and software products.

“Crowdsourced testing is rewriting traditional web and software development methodologies” says Simon Papineau, the company’s president. “Since our inception, we’ve helped companies deliver better interactive products on-time and on-budget by providing them with excellent software testing services on short notice and at all hours of the day. Crowdsourced testing is always what we’ve wanted to do. With the launch of our new platform, we are now in great position to take a leadership position in this innovative industry.”

The Crowdsourced Testing company will initially rely on QA on Request’s in-house software testing experts to begin its operations. Both entities will share employees to ensure that clients of the new company receive excellent services while avoiding the pitfalls of crowdsourcing.

For more information about the Crowdsourced Testing company, visit our website at: http://crowdsourcedtesting.com

About QA on Request

Founded in 2011, QA on Request specializes in testing mobile apps, web sites, video games and software projects during the development phase, making sure they are bug-free and ready for launch. Based in Montreal, the company was a finalist of the 2011 Angel Investors Challenge and later selected in the 5th cohort of the global accelerator Start-Up Chile.

QA on Request is one of 101 start-ups selected for the fifth cohort of the program, for which 1509 team of entrepreneurs had applied. Selected participants receive US$40k of equity-free seed capital, a 1-year work visa, and access to local financial and social networks.

The Montreal start-up ecosystem has been very good to us so far. Now, with Start-Up Chile’s support, we will continue developing our technological platform, our community of software testers and our clientele in South America and around the world.

But things get even better. We found out today that LOJIQ, Les Offices Jeunesse Internationaux du Québec, is offering us a grant to participate in the program.

This is a really exciting period for QA on Request, and we can’t wait to share with you the latest developments with the company.

About QA on Request

Founded in 2011, QA on Request specializes in quality assurance testing for web and software projects. The company was a finalist in the 2011 Angel Investors Challenge and a recipient of the Young Entrepreneur grant. Today, the growing team provides software testing services to several small and medium developers across North America.

About Start-Up Chile

Start-Up Chile is a program created by the Chilean Government that seeks to attract early-stage high potential entrepreneurs to bootstrap their startups using Chile as a platform to go global.

During the six months the participants must be in Chile – for which they receive US$40k of equity-free seed capital, a 1-year work visa, and access to local financial and social networks – the objective is to raise funds, hire talent, create networks, and to launch their businesses from Chile while leveraging and interacting fully with the local entrepreneurship ecosystem.

For more information about the Start-Up Chile experience, please visit: www.startupchile.org

About LOJIQ

LOJIQ was founded in 2007 to help young Canadian entrepreneurs develop their business ventures internationally.

For more information about LOJIQ, please visit: http://www.lojiq.org/

If you like your work never to be dull, then you’ve come to the right place. We send our testers work opportunities at all hours of the day. Start your day by testing an iPhone app, and later switch to testing a video game for PC, reporting bugs in Mantis and JIRA. Functional testing, localization testing, compatibility testing, no two projects are alike.

As a software tester at QA on Request, you’ll test:

Web sites
Mobile apps
Video games
Software
basically, anything interactive

We provide exclusively functional testing services. We are looking to hire experienced testers who are already familiar with the various tools of the trade. No experience = no call back. We’re looking for “la crème de la crème” as they say.

We ask for a lot, but we also have a lot to offer:

Huge opportunities for growth
Help shape the future of the company
Make your own schedule
Above average salary

Part-time employees are welcome. Please apply directly on our Careers page.

The evaluating committee selects local startups based on the quality of their business plan, the likelyhood of success and the potential of job creation in the area.

Following our nomination at the 2011 Angel Investors Challenge, we are very grateful for this second accolade from the montreal startup community.

A good bug always contains a screenshot or a video, whichever is necessary to really convey the nature of the bug without doubt. Often when testing an iPhone app, a screenshot is sufficient.

Apple has made it so easy for us to take screenshots by pressing the home and power button simultaneously, and now with iCloud and Photo Steam these pictures can be instantly updated to the computer in front of you over wifi.

The time required to enter bugs has just been reduced by half. Mobile apps testing has never been easier!

Here’s an example of a simple bug found on the Canadian Videogame Awards website: on several of the nominees’ pages, the URL used for the link to the game’s official website is incorrect, taking the user to a 404 page not found page. You can view a screenshot of the bug here.

 
It happens on the following pages (of the English portion of the site):
 

 
http://www.canadianvideogameawards.com/2012/02/15/ena-space-shooter-freefra-space-shooter-free/

http://www.canadianvideogameawards.com/2012/02/14/enyour-shape-fitness-evolved-2012fryour-shape-fitness-evolved-2012/

http://www.canadianvideogameawards.com/2012/02/15/enswarmfrswarm/

http://www.canadianvideogameawards.com/2012/02/14/encold-warfrcold-war/

http://www.canadianvideogameawards.com/2012/02/14/ensuperbrothers-sword-sworcery-ep-frsuperbrothers-sword-sworcery-ep/

http://www.canadianvideogameawards.com/2012/02/25/enmonster-burnerfrmonster-burner/

http://www.canadianvideogameawards.com/2012/02/14/enmargaritaville-onlinefrmargaritaville-online/

http://www.canadianvideogameawards.com/2012/02/07/enmadden-12frmadden-12-2/

http://www.canadianvideogameawards.com/2012/02/14/enjust-dance-3frjust-dance-3/

http://www.canadianvideogameawards.com/2012/02/14/enfriendship-4-coloursfrfriendship-4-colours/

http://www.canadianvideogameawards.com/2012/02/14/enfight-night-championfrfight-night-champion/

http://www.canadianvideogameawards.com/2012/02/03/enbattlefield-3frbattlefield-3/

http://www.canadianvideogameawards.com/2012/02/25/enassassins-creed-recollectionfrassassins-creed-recollection/

 

Crowdsourced testing is emerging as an efficient way to streamline interactive software production and improve the quality of the software produced by developers. Indeed, it offers a number of advantages:

1- Flexibility: Freelance testers are available at all hours of the day. This is particularly handy for those late nights before a deadline.

2- Instantaneity: Unlike traditional software testing companies, crowd testers are available on short notice and enable you to get results in as little as a few hours.

3- Automatic compatibility testing: When dealing with external users, your products are likely to be tested on a wider range of platforms that those you have in-house. These include older browser versions, other operating systems, and different hardware devices.

But crowdsourced testing also has its flaws. Applied literally, it is exposed to two significant pitfalls:

1- Security and confidentiality: When offering your project to a crowd for testing, it is exposed to a large number of internet users worldwide. If your project is still unreleased, you may be uneasy with the fact that a large number of users are able to access it fully and discover its secrets.

2- Inconsistent quality and increased workload: The users that compose your crowd of testers are from different backgrounds, speak different languages, and possess different levels of experience. When browsing through the results of your tests, you will undeniably find a number of poorly-written bugs, duplicate bugs, and erroneous bugs. The gains you’ve made by crowdsourcing your software testing are seriously hindered by the amount of time you have to spend filtering bugs and ensuring their validity and accuracy.

This is why QA on Request does things differently. We do not “crowdsource” in the traditional sense of the term.

First, we combine an internal, permanent team of testers with a crowd of experienced software testers working from home. This enables us to ensure the quality of the work that we deliver, and to offer complimentary services such as test plan design and on-site guerilla QA.

Secondly, we filter the members of our network of freelancers to accept only experienced software testing professionals. Applicants without formal training and significant professional experience are turned down. This is done to ensure the quality and the validity of the bugs reported.

Thirdly, we dispatch your tests to individual testers based on their experience, available material, and languages mastered. We always know exactly who is testing your project, and what material they have at their disposal. You can even specify a particular version of an operating system that you’d like to be used during your tests.

This way, we take the benefits of crowdsourced testing, and minimize the inconvenients. The result is stellar quality assurance testing services around the clock.

Then why is it so often neglected?

I have worked in both small and large software development companies. For large companies, software testing was a no-brainer. Highly-specific development centers send their requests to testing centers, often located off-site.

More and more, these testing centers are located offshore, in China, India, and other Asian countries. It makes sense if you think about it, given the difference between the timezones. If a company can obtain results over night, it effectively streamlines their development process.

Montreal, for a number of years now, has also been known as a hub for software testing. Especially in the field of video game development. Part of the reason for this are the numerous government incentives for job creation in the industry. Video game development companies like Ubisoft, or testing houses like Babel Media have build extensive testing centers to cater to their needs.

But if you look at smaller web, software or video game development companies, very few of them employ a full-time dedicated testing staff.

I believe the reason why an internal team of software testers is so hard to maintain is because of the creative and challenging aspects of interactive software development.

Inspirations strikes at all hours of the day – if you’ve worked with programmers, then you know this. Passionate developers (and I include artists in the term “developers”) will take advantage of every second they have to polish a product before it is sent to the client. How often have you worked on an interactive project until the late hours of the morning, just in time for a delivery before dawn?

If you maintain an internal team of software testers, it’s impossible to constantly modify their schedule as it is impossible for a programmer to tell ahead of time with precision exactly when he’ll be done developing a particular feature of an interactive product.

Combine this challenge with the numerous other challenges of the “fixed-price fixed-date” servicing industry, and you’ve got a real pickle on your hands. And that’s why the sad reality is that quality assurance testing is often accomplished by the project’s manager, or the account manager, or the janitor even when he’s free.

So have the smaller development companies figured out a way to code without creating bugs? Or is there simply a general acceptance in the industry that testing your software project is just “a nice thing to do when you can” ?

Project managers in large corporations involved in complex IT projects confirm that QA testing should represent AS MUCH AS 33% of a project’s hours – that number is significantly higher than the usual 0%.

Granted it is easier to test projects destined to a platform for which the hardware manufacturer provides clear guidelines for quality assurance testing, and the internet does not. (Nor does Apple for the iPhone.) So in a lot of cases, companies do not know where to begin when in comes to QA testing.

And really the only thing that matters to an eager client or to a watchful boss is how much it costs.

That’s why QA on Request chooses to specialize in functional testing. To facilitate the integration of QA testing in a typical development process. Most interactive development companies only care about “does it work as intended?”, “are there bugs that hinder the user’s experience?”, and “when can it go live without a glitch?”

So that’s what we’re here for. At all hours of the day. QA on Request is your software testing partner for those late nights where you want your interactive project thoroughly tested by a professional so that you can immediately continue developing when you return to work next. Ideal, isn’t it?
 

If you are unfamiliar with the Unified Testing Initiative (UTI), it is an initiative led by key players of the mobile industry – such as AT&T, LG, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung and many more. Their objective is to provide guidance and useful documentation to the mobile development community.

For many years, the Java Verified certification was the standard in mobile apps testing. Now that the landscape has changed, the UTI has evolved is now setting the standard for Android apps development.

The Unified Testing Criteria for Android applications, released in March 2011, covers every aspect of Android applications: installation, interruptions, readability, performance and multiple display format handling.

If you’re planning on releasing an Android app soon, be sure to have it tested before it goes live!