Andy Brice wrote an excellent post on outsourcing software testing. One line dear to my heart:
It isn’t sufficient to do all your own testing on software you wrote, no matter how hard you try.
Andy, like me, runs a one-person software company. He used two software testing companies, one in India and one in Ukraine, both of which charge $15/hour.
I'm tempted to use one of the companies Andy tried. The problem I foresee, however, is that testing Poker Copilot requires a lot of knowledge about poker and the definition of the statistics. Even trickier is that testing the Head-up Display requires playing online poker.
I'll have to give this one some more thought.
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9 comments:
Do you use Sparkle for updates? My humble suggestion would be to create an alpha which is automatically updated via TeamCity whenever you do a checkin. The way I convert people to perpetually use the alpha (well, I call it beta...) is:
Customer/Prospect: OMG bug.
Me: OMG fix, please use binary here: http://beta.whatever.com
Customer/Prospect: OMG works. I'm happy
Then they will always be using the beta.
Haven't had it backfire on me yet but there are quite a few users out there who stick to the beta just because they know it is the one with the most up-to-date fixes.
A good way (so far) to get testers out of happy customers/users.
I'm tempted to use one of the companies Andy tried.
If we're the company you're tempted to - I can offer you a contracting test engineer assigned to a project, who is a real poker player.
Two of us actually play poker too, but at a very amateurish level.
Seems likely that the only real solution to the testing issue is to get to work on building a strong user community. If you had a real forum, with certain sub-boards limited to power users, you'd get a lot of test feedback for free. This is how the open source community gets the job done, and it's very effective. Wordpress, Joomla, Phorum, they're all very simple, powerful tools that don't cost a dime.
Some of us don't really want to do much testing, but others will line up to be guinea pigs. They just need some encouragement, nurturing, and some sort of recognition of their status. A private playground where they get to discuss and play with the latest pre-release PcoP toys will do the trick.
All due respect to testlab2, I agree with KeithX! That being said, I think you can still outsource testing so long as you tell them what to test. You must have a set of manual tests you run as well?
Agree with Keith. By engaging your customers as testers, your testers will match very closely to your userbase, and if you're really targeted with what you ask us to test for you, you can get comparable technical feedback.
@Sohail, I like your idea. I don't use Sparkle because as far as I know it doesn't work with Java. I'd love to be proved wrong, though!
Regards,
Steve
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Steve McLeod
Founder, Poker Copilot
http://www.pokercopilot.com
Ah, well I'm sure there must be a way to do it. I am tempted to start using Sparkle for the Mac version as that is a really bad upgrade experience.
Err, as my *current* upgrade experience is really bad.
Why you want to pay for testing when you have (also german) customers which are delighted about your product (the price compared to the featues as also your way) and use it every day.
Need some testing? Ask some customers like me if they are willing to help (without payment). I am running a software company too which develops stock brokerage software and i do testing a lot ...
If you like i can give you a project space in our JIRA (and/or Confluence and all the other Atlassian Tools) too. just send me a message if you like ...
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