Applause vs. Rainforest QA

Tester skill and experience is varied so it's important for the project manager to properly understand your requirements. The better they can build a team to suit your needs, the better your results will be. This will require a number of test cycles and fine tuning to get it right. It also fares better with consumer applications which are designed for the "common" user. For example, if you have a niche product designed for businesses, this type of testing may not be a good fit.

Incentivized

• In-the-wild testing - it cannot be done internally. It's impossible to cover the wide matrix of devices and OS versions.
• Exploratory testing - more eyes see more. Every mind is unique and thinks of a workflow differently - provides better coverage of the product.
• Care provided by test lead is essential - they help a lot with initial bug triage and bug transfer to our internal systems.
• Retest of found tickets once they are fixed - saves time!
• Applause people make a good effort to create a relationship, it's not just business.

• In using MBM (Mobile Beta Management), it would be better to have the surveys be based on completion of a specific task instead of time or number of app access. This might be a little more complex to set up, but would be well worth it.
• A "stakeholder management" view would be nice to allow those not normally using the tool to get a quick status of testing.
• A "stakeholder management" view for MBM would be nice to allow those not normally using the tool to get a quick status of progress and user feedback.

Incentivized

The one missing point is for the price - it's quite expensive to maintain the service to the extent of how we use it (dozens of test cycles and hundreds of test case hours on monthly basis). However the benefits still weights the price, especially when thinking of the price of potential hot fixes. Still, the price can be a reason to take a look on how competition is doing.

The UI and the whole app is updated on regular basis, quite often actually. There are some cool features, like integration with several other bug tracking tools, which makes the bug management really easy. However there are some key usability issues within some of the less used workflows, which brings the score down a bit. They need to work on better switching between products and better bug search, especially across purchased products.

I know the score doesn't really correspond with my earlier answers, but I have really special relationship with the Applause people. I don't really go through official support. I rather use my internal connections to make my request handled as soon as possible - and it works really well! I don't need to go through the official channels. And it's known that the unofficial ones are much more effective. I can confirm!

I didn't need to be involved at all. It was seamless from our perspective. All products were inserted in by Vendor, only Test Cycles we needed to insert ourselves initially. Now even that is handled by Vendor. The only thing we need to pay attention now is - to request cycles at the right time and review the bugs found during the test cycles. Nothing else. Very good experience!

By the time we signed the contract, there was no competition to Applause (back in time the company was called uTest). Ever since, we didn't evaluate anyone else because we built a very close relationship, which works for both sides. I think Applause is the furthest in building the test community

• Positive
• - we were able to provide good QA on an increased number of deliverables in a shorter period of time.
• - great interaction with the Applause team, test leads and others
• - high quality candidates added to our team
• Negative
• - the contract model (based on number of projects for specified monthly periods) was a little tricky for our development life cycles and left us at times wanting to engage test cycles but unable to do so while simultaneously having a project sitting idle for weeks after test cycles completed. Our business model was not a great fit for the contract model.