Answers.com

What’s the easiest and most cost-effective way to test a social trivia game, to be released as a website, iPhone app and Facebook app, in less than three weeks?

For the answer to that question, like all others, you should reference Answers.com. With branches in Israel and New York, the publicly-traded, 90-person company has provided curious web users with answers to millions of questions since 2005. The leading answer engine provides extensive information by combining over 250 trusted reference resources, a video library covering thousands of topics, and its user-generated Q&A contributed by its millions-strong global community.

In 2010 – as three versions of the company’s “blufr” app moved to production – Answers.com’s Senior Product Manager Lea Aharonowich decided that uTest could provide the most efficient method for testing under real-world conditions.

The “blufr” app is described as a “funky, fast-paced trivia game” that challenges you to decide whether certain statements are true or false. The objective for users is to gain points, awards and bragging rights. The objective for testers was to find critical bugs prior to launch.

This case study will examine how QA professionals from around the world helped Answers.com test their application across three major platforms: the Web, iPhone and Facebook.

Test Cycle #1: www.blufr.com

To start, Answers.com began by running a standard, functional test cycle of the “blufr” web application. The objective here was to verify the product’s core features and functionality against various operating systems (Windows, Mac), browsers (IE, Chrome, Safari) and other categories. With the help of their uTest project manager, Answers.com would create and upload detailed test cases to reflect these criteria.

From there, uTest assembled a 10-person team comprised of their top-rated testers, who would perform these tasks as part the functional and exploratory test cycle. Aharonowich and her team would spend the next week monitoring submitted bugs via uTest’s online platform. By the time the release was closed, Aharonowich had familiarized herself with the uTest process – and began to realize the full benefit of crowdsourced testing.