Little did I know about crowd sourcing opportunities when I quit my full time job few years back. Crowd sourcing was fairly a new term then, at least in this part of the world. Google search helped me identify few crowd sourcing websites offering work to India. I did few data annotation work that earned me few dollars. But I always wanted to get back to do what I love the most. After registering with many sites, one day I received an invite mail for a testing project.
Working on a crowd sourced testing project is never the same like regular project testing. My pilot project was testing a florist website. I had 2 hours to test the website, in which I could log a max of 25 bugs. If the bug was already logged by someone else, mine would be marked duplicate and I would not be getting the points. After having worked for so long, little did I realize that with a timer, finding bugs is exactly same as writing an exam! No matter how much ever I tried to think, the clock timer made me nervous and I would stop thinking and start afresh.
After nearly one hour, I could find a bug, I immediately logged in to the site,to check if the bug was logged already, My bad luck!, there was a similar bug, not exactly the same case. Nevertheless I did log this bug. I knew that the bug would be marked duplicate. It happened the same way, the reviewer marked it duplicate. I then logged few UI issues, which were accepted as low priority bugs. I had another 30 mins to complete the task, which is when I realized that I hadn't checked the basic functionality. All I had to do was select some flowers in the shopping cart, proceed to checkout, provide address, and make payment. Ha, when timer runs, you just stop thinking! This simple task wasn't working!!! Would you believe, people like me were busy thinking too many things, but the shopping cart didn't allow people to checkout with just flowers! I was getting server error when I tried to checkout.I thought that I hadn't read the instructions properly and re-read it once more just to make sure that the functionality was the same as what I expected. Yes, that was a show stopper, now all I had was 10 mins to log the bug. I took a screenshot, logged into the shared spreadsheet and entered the bug with just few mins to spare!! Hurrah!! I logged a show stopper after so much of effort!! I was one among the top 10 testers of that project. This first project gave me the confidence to work on crowd sourcing testing projects. To work on such projects, I learnt that I should first stop looking at timer and then first start with basic functionality check. No software is bug free. Even if a some one had logged a similar issue, one shouldn't stop thinking in the same direction, for it could help in uncovering new issues!
Working on a crowd sourced testing project is never the same like regular project testing. My pilot project was testing a florist website. I had 2 hours to test the website, in which I could log a max of 25 bugs. If the bug was already logged by someone else, mine would be marked duplicate and I would not be getting the points. After having worked for so long, little did I realize that with a timer, finding bugs is exactly same as writing an exam! No matter how much ever I tried to think, the clock timer made me nervous and I would stop thinking and start afresh.
After nearly one hour, I could find a bug, I immediately logged in to the site,to check if the bug was logged already, My bad luck!, there was a similar bug, not exactly the same case. Nevertheless I did log this bug. I knew that the bug would be marked duplicate. It happened the same way, the reviewer marked it duplicate. I then logged few UI issues, which were accepted as low priority bugs. I had another 30 mins to complete the task, which is when I realized that I hadn't checked the basic functionality. All I had to do was select some flowers in the shopping cart, proceed to checkout, provide address, and make payment. Ha, when timer runs, you just stop thinking! This simple task wasn't working!!! Would you believe, people like me were busy thinking too many things, but the shopping cart didn't allow people to checkout with just flowers! I was getting server error when I tried to checkout.I thought that I hadn't read the instructions properly and re-read it once more just to make sure that the functionality was the same as what I expected. Yes, that was a show stopper, now all I had was 10 mins to log the bug. I took a screenshot, logged into the shared spreadsheet and entered the bug with just few mins to spare!! Hurrah!! I logged a show stopper after so much of effort!! I was one among the top 10 testers of that project. This first project gave me the confidence to work on crowd sourcing testing projects. To work on such projects, I learnt that I should first stop looking at timer and then first start with basic functionality check. No software is bug free. Even if a some one had logged a similar issue, one shouldn't stop thinking in the same direction, for it could help in uncovering new issues!
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