Hot answers tagged testing
7
You can get great feedback at http://news.ycombinator.com make sure to post in the "Ask" section.
Also, you can try to submit your startup to http://betali.st
You should also submit your startup to as many blogs and bloggers as possible.
5
What the general strategy tends to be is to offer a free version of the application for testing, and to build traction with your users, and then come out with a paid version once you have a significant user base. A portion of your existing user base will convert to the paid version, netting you income, and you wont piss of the rest of your customers.
...
4
This question has a lot of components, but I'll take a stab at it.
a) Recruitment for a restaurant review site beta is a little tricky. Generally speaking, there are many ways to approach recruitment. You could use sites like Betali.st and LaunchRock (I think you saw my answer on this yesterday) to build some awareness socially. You could also work on ...
4
You can use the following services to find beta testers.
Prefinery
uTest
Centercode
For security testing, I would suggest to look at hosted services such as
iViZ
Fortify
4
QA is crucial for more then just ROI. If your product doesn't work, your customers will not buy it. If it causes them hard (delete their info, waste their time or anything else) they will actively tell people not to use your product, or worst.
The last thing you want is to be associated with a product that didn't meet quality standards. Unit testing, ...
4
From your wikipedia link it appears to have been invented in 2003 and then ignored for the next 8 years.
"The system is a psychometric test based on the work of Carl Jung, and linking his work to the I Ching"
You might be better off googling "Wealth Dynamics scam" and follow what pops up.
4
Typically you would provide a little more direction. I don't think you could send someone a URL and then just ask them those questions. What you would normally do is give them a URL and ask them to perform a particular task.
Find a particular sweater and purchase it...
Post a comment on your favorite article...
Contact us through our website...
Then ask ...
3
Congratulations! You've accidentally discovered the profound truth that strict constraints (being new to Ruby, say) sometimes produce better products (you stayed simple and users liked it!).
Your best test may be to introduce the charge soonest, with, say, a three month free trial, with no need for people to pre-enter payment details.
That gives you time ...
3
It used to be called "vapor-ware" and had a negative connotation. Now apparently it is a popular thing to do. I think it is deceitful and annoys me as a consumer. I will stay away from any company who does this; I will not purchase if they do create the product/service
I know Rob Walling promotes this idea but I would try a different way rather than make ...
3
Thanks Apoorva! :-)
If you've done it a few times and it works, I say go ahead and don't worry about statistical significance.
Instead, simply continue to monitor how much it's costing you. The reason: Over time that number will change anyway due to the shifting sands of internet marketing and potential competition.
At Smart Bear we have 30+ marketing ...
3
Ask this on stackoverflow.
That said, yes, we unit test. Not because it catches all bugs, or because it prevents us from introducing regressions, but because it speeds up testing here and now. Whenever we're running a test on new code, we find that we need to test it, tweak it, and then re-test it. Writing that as a unit test very rapidly saves time over ...
2
I'm a complete believer in unit testing. It took me a while to get the hang of it, but once I got past the learning curve, it saved me far more time than it cost.
The main benefits for me were:
It helped us improve the design of the code by forcing us to decouple components. This came in handy later when we needed to swap out certain modules or cut ...
2
Automated testing is essential for a software startup. You are wasting time and money if you forego rigorous unit and functional testing.
Writing Unit Tests helps you write software more quickly. It will allow you to catch bugs earlier, prove functionality, and document usage.
Software Startups usually cannot afford QA or have minimal QA staffing. The ...
2
I have been fairly successful finding beta testers in LinkedIn and Twitter, by providing a link to a landing page that has some information about my web app. In LinkedIn I just ask the question about people wanting to do beta testing and there is usually a good number of people willing to try.
I usually use unbounce.com to create landing pages.
2
You might consider segmenting the market into paid and unpaid by feature-set. For example, for free, users get feature A, B, and C. For the silver package ($1/mo.) a user can also get features D, E, F, and G. I'm sure you get the idea. Then, you see how many people sign up for the silver vs. gold vs. platinum package. If you find too few users signing up for ...
2
Building software is easy, finding uses is the hard part. You need to find your early adopters -- people who understand that its software in development, bugs and all. They are out there. I think you're on the right track with the sign-up. Put someone in charge of getting that page out there and driving sign-ups. Set a goal of 10, 100, or 1000 sign-ups and ...
1
How about this list - "Quora - What are some crowdsourcing services similar to Amazon Mechanical Turk?"
Some are alternatives, some are meta-platforms built on top of mtuk and may not have the same US-only restriction.
1
Where did the clicks go?
It's probably not really something to be worried about, and in the end, you may need to just accept a difference as a part of life.
There are lots of things that lead to inconsistencies like this. As Ryan pointed out, delays in processing and timezone changes could easily be the problem.
I have a website with Google Ads, and also ...
1
Actually I am going through this right now and it seems that the most efficient way to do this for me was to target and contact potential customers and see if they would be my beta testers and in return I would give them free access to the system. This is giving me real world feedback and a possible inroad to my target market.
Good luck, Tim - VA
1
Horses for courses. You can validate pricing, or you can validate a feature set. If you want to do both, you'd be better off doing full-on split testing (A=product first: A1 vs A2; B=pricing first: B1 vs B2; optimize A(1,2) and B(1,2) then play A(opt) vs B(opt). If you're being fancy and either find it easy to get traffic or have budgeted for acquiring ...
1
Unless you have very low margins and need to validate the pricing before getting started, I wouldn't put it on your landing page.
I think it would complicate the issue, at this stage you want to find out if there is interest in the idea. If people don't sign up, you know why. If you have pricing there too, now you don't know if the idea is poor, or the ...
1
I find the best way to test someone's skills is to look at previous work they have done. And, if I know I'm going to need certain skills, to actually test for those skills in particular. In my case this worked because I was knowledgeable about the problem domain I was hiring for. If you don't have those skills, well, you might not actually know which ...
1
Do you know people in HR departments? That's who you should be talking to.
Ideally before you built your application you would have ran this idea past them and taken their feedback to help determine what to build. I might start there regardless. Even though you've already built it, it would be better to figure out what you should have built before you ...
1
One such website in the news these days is utest.com. They work on crowd sourcing model and I have seen rave reviews about it. (I am assuming here you mean functional testing only and not "white box" testing)
Check its review here
(Disclaimer: I am not affiliated to uTest.com in any way)
1
Perhaps the question is slightly different.
Figuring out what to build “What is the smallest or least complicated problem that the customer will pay us to solve?” vs "Offering something behind a buy button that doesn't exist" are two different approaches.
I agree with others that the latter seems a bit negative / underhanded, but the former requires ...
1
I've used OpenHallway with some successes. It's simple and gets the job done when used to capture specific use cases or tasks. The only issue I experienced was the limit of 20 minutes per recording was forgotten by some people who'd been focused on an app for 20 minutes and so they carried on using and narrating, thinking they were still helping us out and ...
1
It depends on your end goal. If you want to get it out quickly, before the competition, then whatever doesn't help you with that hurts you.
If you want to design for maintenance now then unit test.
If you are in the very early stages and your design is changing a great deal, then unit testing can be a pain, as you will constantly be changing tests just ...
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