Bug Battle: A Software Testing Competition

The uTest Bug Battle is a quarterly software testing competition where thousands of testers from around the world compete to find bugs in today's most popular web, mobile, desktop and gaming applications.

Update: In the first Bug Battle of 2010, the uTest community will compete to find bugs on the websites of the four major US television networks:

The competition kicks off on Friday, February 5 at Noon (ET) and will run through Friday, February 12 at Noon (ET).

Here's how the competition works: Testers are given one week each quarter to search for the most compelling bugs within various software applications (see below for previous Bug Battles). Once the competition is over, testers then fill out a detailed survey, ranking each application in terms of usability, intuitiveness and other criteria. From there, a panel of uTest judges evaluates each submission, and awards thousands of dollars in prizes for the following categories:

Top overall tester
Top novice tester
Top tester
Best bugs
Best feedback

To get a better idea of how the competition works, here are recaps of our first five uTest Bug Battles:

Battle of the E-Tailers - As the holiday shopping season hit full swing, our community tested the sites of Target, Amazon and Walmart.

Battle of the Search Engines - In our most challenging Bug Battle to date, testers search the search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo!).

Battle of the Desktop Twitter Apps - Hundreds of testers competed to find bugs in five of the most popular Twitter apps.

Battle of the Social Networks - We asked our testers to evaluate Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn.

Battle of the Browsers - In our first Bug Battle, our testers evaluated the beta versions of IE 8, Firefox 3.1, and Google Chrome.

If you have questions, of if you'd like to suggest a software application for future Bug Battles, be sure to let us know.