Tapulous

It didn't take long for Tapulous to conquer the iPhone with Tap Tap Revenge. In less than two years, they had become a household name among iPhone users and the envy of mobile app companies worldwide.

There was definitely some luck involved, said VP of Engineering Jess Kahn, but their success has been anything but a fluke. The Dartmouth grad, who spent ten years at Apple as a software engineer, credits their good fortune to a combination of talented personnel, calculated execution and impeccable timing.

Of course, there were plenty of challenges along the way. Like other mobile app companies, Tapulous would have to find an efficient way to consistently test their latest versions. With tight deadlines and limited in-house resources, using standard testing methods would ultimately prove to be an exercise in futility.

“We wanted to avoid falling into the trap of testing ourselves,” said Jess. “Otherwise, it’s just another task piled on to an 80-hour work week. And managing an offshoring firm, for a company our size, was totally out of the question.”

This case study will demonstrate why Tapulous turned to uTest for their mobile app testing needs - covering the results of their exploratory and functional test cycles; the role of uTest’s project manager; the limits of beta testing and more.

Tapped Out: The Limits of Beta Testing
“Our target users are teenage boys with no formal tester training,” explained Jess. “So as beta testers, they are likely to give us defects that don’t contain very much detail. They tend to point out nuances with the in-game experience – timing issues, high score discrepancies and things like that. It’s certainly valuable feedback, and we are lucky to have it, but unfortunately it’s not a substitute for professional testing.”

Since offshoring was “out of the question” Jess would need to find a way to ensure testing coverage that would not burden her in-house resources any further. And with another version of Tap Tap Revenge schedule for release in the weeks ahead, she would need to find such a solution quickly.

“I decided to spend a day doing research,” said Jess. “And it didn’t take me long to find uTest. They were headquartered in the US, and didn’t require us to spend much time or money to get started, so we gave it a shot.”