Published on the 09/12/2016 | Written by Anthony Caruana

Scarcely a day goes by when we don’t hear about a critical application flaw that’s led to the election of a madman to a country’s leadership or some other technology catastrophe…

Once everyone picks up the pieces, the question that gets asked is “What the hell happened to testing?”

Having spent a lot of time working for large companies involved in developing their own software, I know that lots of resources are allocated at the start of projects to testing. But as deadlines loom and projects run behind time, some time must be saved. And testing is often one of the places that gets cut.

If testing is hard, then there’s an opportunity for someone to make it better. Instead of testing being as interesting as watching paint dry, is there a way to make testing sexy?

Bugwolf’s founder and CEO Ash Conway reckons he’s done just that. The company delivers testing tools on a SaaS basis, which it said requires no training, and which add some gamification to make the jobs of testers less painful.

“I was looking for a problem that customers were struggling to solve. I’d built a number of products before and was pretty frustrated by testing. I knew the market had changed in how we were building and shipping and testing was struggling to keep up,” he said.

By integrating a gamification system into the web-based platform, Conway claimed Bugwolf is far more engaging than other testing products.

“There’s a competitive edge to it. But importantly, the testers are earning additional compensation by using Bugwolf. During a ‘test challenge’ there’s a leaderboard and other motivations.”

Bugwolf lets companies use either internal or external resources to engage in the testing process. Conway said the platform is easy to use and people can create test challenges without any previous experience. They also offer their own testers so businesses can quickly scale up their test team if needed without having to hire additional resources.

“They can pull in a Bugwolf vetted team if they need it,” Conway confirmed.

He said the combination of the platform, ease of use, and ability to rapidly expand and execute testing is the company’s value proposition over competitors – something that is crucial as agile delivery models are producing new software releases every two weeks.

“You need to be testing with real people. Automation is fantastic, we live and breathe it. Customers are doing it more and more. But at the end of the day it’s a real human consuming the software and you need real people testing products in the delivery cycle,” he pointed out.

Part of Bugwolf’s offering is an ROI tool that helps companies determine whether the tool is delivering value. It does this by apportioning value to the remediation of bugs. If a severe bug is found in testing, that equates to value for the customer.

But does it really making testing more interesting than paint drying? Bugwolf certainly talks a good game.