Prakat builds testing crowd on cloud

BANGALORE, INDIA: In the world of testing, outsourced testing might be new term, but 'crowd-sourcing people for independent testing on cloud', might take aback. Furthermore employing the qualified along with physically disabled to perform software testing should sound out of place.

Prakat Solutions is cloud based independent software testing (IST) service provider is already taking strides in this front. This Bangalore-based start-up is building a network of qualified testers to perform independent testing over the cloud and aims at a team of 10,000 testers in the coming years.

At present, the company has got an internal team of more than 20 testers that serve a handful of clients, while it is building up the network for crowd- testing. The crowd will include students, retired professionals, and people on sabbatical.

The founder and CEO of company, Anuradha Biswas, who has been an evangelist for independent testing for more than 18 years, believes that the combination of cloud-testing, with crowd-sourcing will brings the benefit of cost-arbitrage, domain knowledge and high availability to the customers.

According to Anuradha, the company is working towards building more than crowd of 3000 by 2012.This would include newly trained students and housewives along with team of professionals to work as projects as team leads. While majority of the projects are taken care by the internal team, she expects that the building crowd would soon be able to take the projects up and would soon equally contribute to company's revenue.

Prakat recently partnered with Mitra Jyothi, an organization for blind people. It will set up an accessibility lab to test applications for there accessibility, which will be executed by visually challenged people themselves.

It has also partnered with Bharathiar University, Coimbatore to roll out a program that will train the non-engineering students of the university for software testing. In the first phase of this training about one third of the 104 colleges affiliated with Bharathiar University are participating in the program.