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In the past, start ups have often kept all core aspects of their business in house, preferring to directly control outcomes. While laudable, the model may not be cost-effective. Many companies in my portfolio and that I advise have outsourced development teams which code at much lower cost than in house teams. New options are also emerging, such as UTest, which allows companies to test code without committing to expensive in house QA resources.
According to Xconomy, UTest has become the primary source for outsourced code QA:
"UTest, which helps big companies crowdsource their software quality assurance (QA) testing to a community of 30,000 freelance testers, said today that it has raised $13 million in Series C financing. It’s one of the largest venture funding rounds ever collected by a crowdsourcing company, and from the size of the round, “you should take it as a validation that their business model is working,” say Sharon Wienbar, managing director at San Mateo, CA-based Scale Venture Partners, which led the round. “These guys have more business than they can handle, and it’s all about scaling now.”
The Southborough, MA-based company, which recently opened a Silicon Valley office, has built a software-as-a-service platform where companies submit their code and say what kind of testing they need, then wait for bug reports from uTest’s global community of testers. Wienbar and UTest CEO Doron Reuveni say demand for the service is exploding, in light of the growing number of companies that have software to test."
There are numerous other providers which have similar offerings. Submitting test code for QA to a number of providers with known bugs is one way to quickly test the capabilities of the various offerings.
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