

uTest: Get Paid to Find Bugs - vlad
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/10/utest-now-open-for-business-get-paid-to-find-software-bugs/

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TheTarquin
Get paid to find bugs: Get a job in QA or test engineering.

Seriously, pay is better, as are job security and success rate. I got my start
in industry as the testing guy for a fairly small contract software house. I
started following the instructions on someone else's testing plan, then
eventually graduated to doing my own testing plans, from design to execution.
For someone in his last year of undergrad/right out of school, it afforded
decent pay, good job security, and great industry experience.

Furthermore, it made me a far better coder, because it gave me a crash course
in how to try to break things. It gave me a better sense of where and when
software tends to break. As a result, the software I write is much more
reliable than it would otherwise.

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Funky_
I have to sign up for a pre-paid master card in order to get paid? I gave up
after that.

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vikas5678
Hmmm, well I have done some freelance programming through another similar
website and yeah, I had to sign up and get a debit card(from master card)
through them to get paid, so what? Of course, there was other payment options
but I used the card option so that I could use that later for online
purchasing, etc. I don't think that should convince you to not sign up IMHO.

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asdf1234
beware, it's not ready yet, sign up is a waste of time

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dawnerd
I can see this being useful, but what incentives would I, as a developer have,
of paying people to find bugs? Especially when they pay me and find the bugs
and usually report them anyways?

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reitzensteinm
Bugs found by your paying customers have a cost even if they appear to you to
be free. They increase the total cost of using your software, and in a
perfectly fungible world ruled by rationality that's extra money you could be
charging them for bug free software.

It also helps with massively distributed software where invidiuals are less
likely to report bugs (without some kind of automated bug sendoff tool).
Netscape had their $50 bug scheme, for instance.

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dawnerd
Good points. I never really thought about the increase in cost of using the
software.

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ubudesign
you can alway beta test your software before adding the cost of bug to your
customers

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ivankirigin
I had this idea just yesterday... earn 10 cents to be the first to submit a
bug.

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Kaizyn
Sorry, the Amazon Mechanical Turk beat you to that one.

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ivankirigin
I love Amazon Turk. I wish people used it more. People-powered processes with
contributor cuts is not a new idea at all. I certainly never come up with new
ideas :)

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marketer
This reminds me of topcoder, but for testing

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derefr
Reminds me more of Amazon Mechanical Turk, which I was thinking of using as a
generalized QA mechanism for computer software just the other day--the HIT
would be "Report a new, unique, significant bug on the bug tracker of a piece
of software you use."

