
Why are there not more freelance testers out there? - rosiesherry
http://www.testninjas.com/2013/02/why-are-there-not-more-freelance-testers-out-there/
======
scott_w
From my personal experience, I wouldn't use a freelance tester because they
won't understand the system well enough to provide value for money.

The most valuable testing is that which exposes your lack of understanding of
what the system _should_ do. These also usually require the most extensive
rewrites, so you definitely want them as early as possible. Unfortunately,
they also require the most extensive understanding of the system as well as an
ability to detail their thinking at a level that can be understood by the
development team(s).

That's why I don't see the value of freelance testers, and I'd much rather
have somebody employed on a more permanent basis, either part-time or full-
time.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
That's the same argument for not hiring freelance developers or project
managers. And IMHO it leads to lazy coupling of software systems and services,
a system that has to be built and tested by different or changing groups has
to have much much better scope and decoupling.

In short, if you have small (micro) services, they are easy to build and
easier to test.

~~~
scott_w
I disagree. With good testing discipline, you can bring in freelance
developers. Developers have the luck of not needing 100% understanding, as
this is grown through the writing of code.

Testing, on the other hand, is a simulation of how your system responds to
user input, and how your users respond to the system's outputs.

If your tester can't simulate a user, then you can make your services as micro
as you like - it'll make no difference when you get the phone call saying the
system doesn't work as expected.

~~~
eru
If new people picking up the app have a problem simulating users, then how do
you assume your users will go about picking up the up to actually use it?

~~~
scott_w
Read my comment below. It's not about users understanding the program per se,
it's about testers having the domain knowledge to perform meaningful tests.

Without that domain knowledge, the testers may find implementation bugs, but
they won't expose the issues caused by the developer's lack of understanding.
The latter is almost always more valuable to find and more difficult to fix.

~~~
eru
Oh, ok. I guess writing automatic tests is one way to nudge developers into
understanding the domain better. And getting a person on the team, even
freelance, whose job it is to push for tests, might help.

Going off another tangent, getting not a generic tester, but a domain expert
who's also a tester, might help.

------
bpatrianakos
I think there's much more to it than what the post says. It seems the author
is looking at the freelance testing industry (is 'industry' the right word
here?) through rose colored glasses.

Freelance web designers and SEOs are everywhere because you don't need any
experience and often times don't even require any actual skill to do the job.
All you need to know is how to repeat the whole "Social media marketing your
business reach customers user experience blah blah nonsense" spiel and people
say "Yeah! I want to miraculously reach the top of Google for everything and
make a billion online like Zuck" and hire some dude for $300 who read "HTML
and CSS for Dummies" last week at a Barnes and Noble. I know this because I
used to be that asshole (not the business owner, the freelancer).

Other kinds of web/tech freelancing have very simple-to-understand values. In
the minds of a lot of people who hire freelancers, Web design = Branding or
Marketing = Profits. Simple. Not exactly correct, but that's the line being
fed to everyone these days. Same with SEO. SEO = Rankings = $1B profit.

Testing is different though. I have to say however that if a company even
needs to test software to begin with then they're probably playing at a higher
level than the companies hiring freelance designer/devs and SEOs. Still, the
value of a tester is still nebulous. You don't hear freelance testers out
there drilling "Testing will make your customers love to use your product,
increase efficiency on yours and the customer's end, and save you a ton of
money" or something equally easy to market. To most businesses testing means
"we played with the app on the staging server and it worked fine for us. time
to push it live". It just comes off as an extra expense that isn't worth the
investment.

And why is that? Because freelance testers, unlike other freelancers, have
failed to create a consistent, marketable appeal to business owners (i.e. tell
them why it's going to make them tons of cash) the way other freelancers have.
And it's probably because those who do testing are a little more thoughtful
and less about pizazz and flash than designer/developers and the nature of
testing itself is kind of boring unless you're really into it yourself. Design
is fun because everyone wants to be an artist. SEO is fun because people are
given the idea they're in control of which keywords they'll pop up for and
such. Testing? Totally boring. Some guy's gonna come in here and find bugs in
our software? We can do that ourselves or just make sure to mark all the
complaint emails as TODOs in Gmail.

~~~
mgkimsal
you're very rarely going to 'make' someone money - you're going to save them
money. A well-tested app doesn't necessarily out-sell the competition if the
competition gets a better distribution deal through 'good old boys'
networking. Demonstrably _bad_ software often becomes dominant in specific
niches, and people put up with the bugs, because "it's what everyone uses".

Your well-tested software still has a huge marketing battle and possibly
integration issues to replace incumbents, regardless of how many bugs they
have. You end up needing to create a negative campaign about the headaches and
hassles of using XYZ, and that you don't have those issues (because it's well-
tested, but you generally can't promote that to most people, as it's 'too
technical').

~~~
doktrin
At first, I thought you were preaching to the converted, here. Whether or not
everyone here uses dedicated testers, they probably all appreciate the _value_
of a well tested system. In theory, that is in fact the case, but reflecting
on my experience this is not usually the case in practice. Testing is dropped
by the wayside when the rubber meets the road - particularly in any early to
mid stage ventures.

IMHO there is a strong cultural component at play. Testers are, quite frankly,
second class citizens in the land of software. This is due in part to the
ambiguity of the term itself, as it can mean everything from a button-clicker
to an engineer (with perception often defaulting to the former).

As a result, testing becomes unsexy. Few developers with options choose to do
it full time, and it becomes an afterthought. Even dev-centric approaches like
TDD get brushed off as "crutches" for "junior" engineers. This all helps
propagate a fairly downward-tending cycle of testers and testing lacking voice
and status within the organization.

------
kenjackson
There is one niche area of testing where it is more common... security
testing.

Testing in this space is often more a function of the technology stack than
the industry of the client. This allows security test companies to build up
great expertise without knowing anything about the client's specific app or
industry.

~~~
3am
I wouldn't even consider penetration/security testing to be in the same field.
My experience in the traditional QA areas is that in order of likelihood to
freelance are performance testers, automation/development testers, and finally
manual testers.

------
3am
I don't know if uTest is still around, but they attempted to fill a similar
niche. If you are in a testing lead position, then you know that an enormous
amount of contracting is arranged via recruiters to fill this need also.

I think the reasons it's really hard for freelance testing communities to get
traction are

1\. real or perceived lack of return - you have a 2-3 month engagement and
realistically the first month is training and acclimatization (hence wasted).
better off hiring a FT resource.

2\. ample market supply - there are plenty of people looking for FT roles. I'm
a testing manager in a secondary technology city in the US, and it's no
trouble to get resumes.

3\. limited scope where they're useful - I would consider freelancing or
hiring a freelancer that specialized in a particular tool (Selenium, Robot,
Cucumber, QTP, etc) if building out a testing framework or conducting major
refactoring but otherwise consider testing an iterative process.

4\. This is a bit of a bootstrapping problem, but it would need a (much)
better version of Angie's List. Because of the reasons I listed before, this
would be a high risk decision and most people would be very reluctant to go
with an unknown quantity. There would have to be a substantial number of
verified ratings and reviews. [EDIT: this is also why so much contract testing
is arranged via recruiters - the recruiter wants repeat business. A bad
referral can poison a relationship, so you have a strong element of trust]

~~~
philk10
Dont want to do UTest marketing and I have reservations about them but they
are still around and Forbes made them their 8th most promising company in USA
so there is some need they are filling - [http://blog.utest.com/forbes-names-
utest-8th-most-promising-...](http://blog.utest.com/forbes-names-utest-8th-
most-promising-company-in-america/2013/02/)

You make some good points which I'd agree with

~~~
3am
I signed up with uTest a while ago and have never done anything else with
them. I'm generally underwhelmed. Seems much more geared for crowdsourcing a
testing effort, which - with all due respect to innovative business models -
seems less than optimal for doing anything other than low level manual
testing.

If I ever went independent (or engaged a freelancer), I'd expect an LLC/s-corp
with a professional online presence, reference sheets, sample work, and
slighly better than LegalZoom-grade contract templates. Consider it my smoke
test of potential partners :)

------
cantlin
We've needed a crowd-sourced human testing platform for software products for
some time.

It would need granularity: as a developer I should be able to purchase N
minutes of time from N people, potentially in such and such a demographic.

It would need an API: I should be able to build human testing into my
deployment infrastructure.

It would need accountability: at minimum I want webcam footage of the tester
using my product.

There are complications, but I see no reason why almost all of these couldn't
be overcome by sufficiently smart automation.

Someone go build this!

~~~
anandkulkarni
We actually do this at MobileWorks (mobileworks.com). There's an API that lets
you get N minutes from N people filtered by demographic. Some folks use our
Premier product for on-demand testing set up by email -- they send test
requests to premier@mobileworks.com.

If you're looking for this more as a formal end-to-end service, you can take a
look at our buddies at Rainforest (<https://www.rainforestqa.com/>). You can
also look at services like uTest, though they're real pricey.

~~~
cantlin
Thanks for that - Rainforest look very interesting (what I can see of it). "QA
as a service" sums it up nicely.

------
jot
There's less demand for freelance testers because having a one is a nice to
have rather than a must have.

Clients rarely understand the value of testers, they appear to simply be an
optional additional cost. Freelance developers have little incentive to
recommend them since it inevitably leads a smaller slice of client budget for
them.

When an organisation gets to the stage at which it understands the value of,
and develops a need for, a tester they probably have enough work and cash to
occupy one full-time.

~~~
manaskarekar
How about 'Disaster Management/Save Face' freelancers?

To cater to the companies that thought testing was an additional expense and
didn't go for it.

~~~
jot
They could probably charge more with a title like that too. :)

------
PaulHoule
I'd say the psychology and politics of testing are different from other
things, really quite strange.

It most white collar work, there is strong pressure to tell people what they
want to hear. Well, it makes me very happy to get a clean bill of health from
a tester, but if I was expecting that to happen, I wouldn't need a tester.

Testing takes a kind of special discipline that the average office worker
doesn't have. Whenever I've been an organization that has tried to press
ordinary people into a tester role, it's always been highly ineffective.

That said, there isn't one formula to make a good tester. Some testers I know
are very systematic, they belong to quality control associations, others are
expert in project management, requirements, etc. On the other hand, one of the
best testers I worked with had bombed out of every other job we gave him
because he was always able to screw up anything we gave him. As a tester, he
was great, because if he couldn't break it, nobody else could.

All of these things, I think, point to a need to a longer-term relationship
with a tester than you're going to get in a freelance situation.

------
nwh
This is advertising for a service that CHARGES people to sign up and test
websites. The blog post serves no purpose other than to funnel traffic to
their domain.

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patja
Testers are mostly a labor commodity. Seems like the body shop contracting
agencies and big offshore firms (Wipro, TCS, etc.) have this market cornered.
Any potential client who really values having a dedicated testing team will
build up the domain knowledge in house rather than re-educate freelancers over
and over, or require the body shop to build that knowledge base and do that
training for them when bringing on a new tester.

And how often do you really need just one tester? What are you going to do,
bring in 10 different freelancers?

Freelancers need to wear more hats than just "tester".

------
testerfromleic
TL;DR - we (testers) need to tackle these problems head on ourselves rather
than wait for people to "get it".

It seems to me, a lot of folks here wouldn't be adverse to using a freelance
tester in general, but are extremely adverse to using bad freelance testing
(and have the scars to prove it!).

I'm a contract tester and recently decided to make the transition to
freelance. From my experience (and confirmed by the comments here) the main
barrier is one of perception - how can testers / add value to my organisation?
And how do I know this tester is as good as they claim?

There are numerous ways someone like me can help an organisation:

Help organisations find the right permanent employees; Mentor said permanent
employees by sharing knowledge; provide testing experience to a known or
unknown business domain; supplement the clients test lab with your own
equipment; evangelise testing throughout the company, demonstrate what good
testing can do, what it looks like

I had to stop myself there! And pretty much all of those examples are from
recent (within 12 months) history. Luckily for me I've been able build a
decent enough reputation that there is potential for repeat business.

Two more key problems: first, the kind of testers that people here need may
live in a bubble where everyone knows the value of testing and as such may not
realise the rest of us exist - my colleagues and I need to start dispensing
some red pills :). Second, the testers that are trying to be better appear to
be outnumbered by the ones that aren't (snake oil merchants, testing zombies,
call them what you will) so again we need to tackle that head on too.

Nice discussion. Thanks for the illuminating comments folks.

------
lutusp
> I think freelance software testers should be easy to find. But they are not.
> I think there should be loads of good freelance testers out there. But there
> are not. I think it should be easier to find freelance testers. But it is
> not.

There's a reason -- software developers have figured out that they're better
off just releasing the product and hearing from their customers. It's called
"beta testing" -- no special panel of testers, just users eager to try a new
product, willing to put up with imperfect operation for the privilege.

And not all beta tests are identified as beta tests -- many of them appear to
be a product release, but the real purpose is to wring out the bugs. The
classic example is Fedora Linux, which is one very long beta test (and one
that most of its users understand).

As to Web sites and online games, developers use A/B testing to accomplish the
same ends, without the need to locate people whose special role is to test.

------
libovness
I've gotten good results through uTest (for bugs) and extremely good feedback
from usertesting.com. Neither is cheap though.

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pasbesoin
Testing is, in the large, not respected.

When you have a really good, competent, creative tester, the contribution can
be invaluable.

But... many organizations tend to rank testers somewhere around the janitorial
staff.

(By the way, get incompetent janitorial service, and watch what happens to
your work environment... And, personally, I've found many of them to be plenty
competent, caring, and helpful -- better people than many of the suits.)

Then, there is the other side of testing... It does exist. People who couldn't
hack (aka "handle") any more, and who really are more or less button pushers.
They are the ones who provide "QA signoff" as opposed to real troubleshooting.

It can be difficult to argue your value, when much of your field is a morass
on two axes: Lack of respect, and lack of competence.

------
TeeDub
What do you mean when you say tester? If you mean "someone to run manual test
cases," it is probably because those sorts of jobs are pure tedium... They can
be outsourced to websites too.

If you mean a software engineer that designs software to validate that other
complex software systems function (often dealing w nontrivial engineering
efforts and undecidable problems) , they probably don't freelance because we
denigrate them by calling them "testers" and they'll get hired fulltime by
companies that understand the value of their work.

------
geogra4
I would love to be a freelance tester. I have no idea how I would start
though.

I have a lot of experience testing desktop apps for my day job, but I'd love
to start something on the side.

Anyone here have ideas on where to start?

~~~
rosiesherry
I'm bias, but helping people get their freelance career off the ground is what
we are trying/doing at Test Ninjas.

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beezee
The time it takes to walk someone through all the use cases that need to be
tested is not trivial. The reason for having a dedicated tester is so that
knowledge of the system accumulates. I can't imagine how having to re-
introduce your system to a new tester for every upcoming deployment could
possibly be a realistic approach. In order for this to make sense I'd have to
build a relationship with a freelance tester so that the same accumulation of
knowledge could take place.

~~~
cantlin
In some circumstances "accumulation of knowledge" in a tester is exactly what
you're trying to avoid. Fresh eyes can be very valuable. Amongst other
reasons, this is why we don't give developers sole responsibility for testing
their own work.

~~~
andybak
That's an interesting point but I think it highlights that there are different
types of testing - even above the obvious UX vs QA distinction.

I find that really good QA testing often needs someone quite technical and
even someone who has some insight into the way the code works. You have to
actively think about ways the system could break. It's probably closer to the
mentality of a penetration test than it is to usability testing.

------
bluetidepro
This is a great idea! I was actually just recently looking for something like
this, to help with testing on an app.

I think my only concern would be security with those who are testing your app,
because you would most likely need them to test use cases by giving them
special accounts and such. Is there some sort of checks and balances for
people who are testers on the site? Can you make the testers sign a NDA before
they test (if the project happen to still be in BETA or something)?

~~~
rosiesherry
Thanks for the positive feedback :) The testers work independently and often
sign NDAs at the moment I am working closely with the testers and clients as a
match making kind of service.

------
MadQA
I actually run a small QA-as-a-service company (for 3+ years) and I should say
that we strive to distance ourselves from "freelance" word as much as
possible.

As most other cheap labors in a remote freelance mode — it is discredited. I
think it would be just hard to build a personal brand strong enough to compete
with tons of people, who can look like a diamond on a pre-sale phase and then
just disappear.

~~~
jonstjohn
How has that worked out for you? Do you find it difficult to find clients?
Much client turnover? Are you doing mostly manual or automated testing?

~~~
MadQA
Finding customers is always a tough task. We started from μ-ISVs with simple
Windows applications to probe the market and see whether people are ready to
buy tests and QA as a service and then slowly expanded the offered services
list.

We have great customer retention (excluding some specific one-time projects,
like a penetration test), I hope due to our dedication :)

I would say manual tests are most popular, and then load tests, then
automation. Often customers start from a tiny manual test and then use our
services more and more, in other QA areas, being happy to receive all of those
from one window in a unified manner.

------
Jmshabangu
One of the reason is that people are scared to freelance for a month full
time, and the next month not getting any job the next month, In SA we dont
have lots of companies that are looking for freelancer.I believe its always
good for a company to get new tester that can produce quality assurance into
their systems.

------
bdcravens
Testing tends to be an intermittent need. Most apps that are to be tested tend
to be off of the public Internet. I think that most orgs are unwilling to take
the time to provide testers access they need (VPN access, etc) given the
ephemeral nature of the relationship.

------
Yrlec
I recently found out about a service that pretty much offers this. It's called
Pay4Bugs: <https://www.pay4bugs.com/>. Has anyone tried it? Is it any good?

~~~
rosiesherry
There's a bunch of those types of services which we are deliberately avoiding
the approach of. It's really hard to know the quality of the testers behind it
all, in addition to that they can raise bugs and give you an idea of what has
been tested, but you doesn't give you an understanding of what hasn't been
tested.

~~~
michaelt
Wouldn't it be awfully easy for an outsourced tester to say "yep, tested foo,
no bugs found" without having tested it thoroughly? You can't outsource
auditing that outsourced work was done properly!

~~~
nicolasedgwick
Yup - just exactly as easy as it is for a developer to say "no bugs in my
code" and leave the job well before a critical ID used in a database reaches
the limit of the "INT" definition that was applied instead of "LONGINT". In
both situations you want to build a level of trust (and
contracts/NDAs/liability insurances) between freelancer and customer ;)

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jtreminio
I originally though you wanted freelancers for creating
unit/integration/behavioral tests, which presents the problem that not all
codebases are testable in current state.

------
silverbax88
I would absolutely hire a freelance tester.

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ahoyhere
I wouldn't hire a freelance tester, because it's so important, we _all_ do
testing in our business. I expect every freelance developer I hire to test
everything thoroughly (and I don't just mean unit tests). They're either full-
service, or I don't hire them.

I've never heard a single coworker or fellow entrepreneur say, "Gee, I really
need to hire a freelance 'tester'." (Or other words that would be more likely,
such as 'Q&A specialist'.) That's something people either don't do at all /
don't care about, or do in-house because they know it's so important.

So, aside from arguments about skills, I don't think there's any demand.

