Even after thorough unit testing and QA at every production level, user acceptance testing can help flush out problems in an application. With Topcoder Bug Hunt competitions, you can get paid for testing completed applications! The more issues you find, the more you earn, and the best Bug Hunt competitors earn great bonuses!
Topcoder Bug Hunt competitions are a single round where all registrants are unleashed on development instances of an application. Once registered, competitors have access to the application and a JIRA issue tracking project for the competition. Competitors simply log every issue found to the JIRA project. Only the first person to submit a valid issue will get credit - duplicates will be marked and discarded. The PM and/or co-pilot are responsible for filtering the issues identified.
A valid issue should contain adequate information to reproduce the bug. If a bug is reported by one competitor only, he/she is selected as the winner.
There are cases that a bug is reported by several competitors. In these cases, among the tickets that contain enough information to reproduce the bug, the one submitted first wins. The editing of tickets are disabled after creation and the winner is determined by the timestamp of the creation of ticket. The competitors can use comments to communicate updates. The copilot/PM will determine whether a comment is a significant update. If it is, the timestamp of this update will be used as the timestamp of the bug report for winner determination.
Phase | Avg Duration | Description |
---|---|---|
Submission | 1 to 5 days | During the submission phase competitors will find and log issues. |
Screening | 1 to 2 days | For each JIRA entry logged, only the first person to submit a specific issue will get credit. A reviewer (either the co-pilot or PM) will review all logged JIRA issues and mark any duplicates. |
Results Announced | Instant | The PM will announce the winners of the contest in the forum. |
That’s it! There is no support or review for this contest. Every valid issue that you log will count towards your total!
Every JIRA issue you submit that is accepted will be paid. The amount per issue is specified in the forum. The competitors who identify the most issues will receive an additional bonus payment for the highest number of accepted issues.
Prizes will be paid and winners announced as soon as the PM has processed all bugs reported.
As the administrator for the contest filters issues that come in, here are the resolutions/statuses that should be used:
Status | Description |
---|---|
Open | An issue that has not been reviewed by the PM. |
In Progress | An accepted issue. |
Won’t Fix | An accepted issue that will not be fixed for whatever reason (scope, budget, etc). |
Cannot Reproduce | A rejected issue that is invalid or inappropriate - members will not be paid for these. |
Duplicate | A rejected issue that duplicates an accepted or rejected issue - members will not be paid for these. |
Note that there will be many situations where the behavior may not be clear from the requirements. In the case where the issue is valid (e.g. the application behaves as the issue report describes and the behavior is reasonably assumed to be erroneous), the issue should be accepted regardless of whether or not fixing it is intended. If you do not wish to follow up on the issue, simply mark it “Won’t Fix”. But the issue will still be considered “accepted” and the reporting member will be paid for the issue report.