TrustRadius: an HG Insights company

Applause

Score6.1 out of 10

16 Reviews and Ratings

Get a Demo

What is Applause?

Applause headquartered in Framingham in Massachusetts offers application testing services.

Categories & Use Cases

Reviews

What users are saying about Applause.
View all reviews

A solution to mobile diversity and fragmentation

Incentivized
Daniel Kwok
Project Manager in Product Management at airG Inc. (51-200 employees employees)

Pros

  • Provides excellent platform, device, and OS coverage across the board. We don't have to worry about purchasing a barrage of devices for in-house testing. It's expensive and doesn't provide a good return for the money.
  • Your Project Manager actively manages your project. They are available almost 100% of the time during business hours to ensure your test needs and concerns are being handled.
  • Applause's test management software is rapidly advancing. It's fairly feature packed and provides good visibility into what's going on with your testing.

Cons

  • Though Applause effectively manages their testers, there can be a gap at times between lining up the testers and getting the results you want. It's a fine balance between fresh eyes gleaning new or glossed over bugs but running the risk of being product ignorant vs. returning testers generating more in-depth issues and risking test exhaustion and jaded perspectives.
  • Applause's Test Management software really needs backward integration with Jira. Currently they support forward integration, but if you're managing your issues internally, all that information (state, comments, etc.) cannot be conveyed back to Applause.

Return on Investment

  • Improved app quality - Applause is a cost-effective means of directed exploratory testing.
  • Reduced risk of product update launches - Quickly have your release candidates sanitized by the real world before they actually go live.

Applause - way to save time on regression testing

Martin Štefan
SW Test Engineer Senior in Quality Assurance at Concur (1001-5000 employees employees)

Pros

  • 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.

Cons

  • The service is quite expensive.
  • The first year of using the service is about finding the right balance. It can initially be more time consuming then the previous model without Applause service.
  • The model motivates the testers to not go very deep during testing - they are paid by bugs found. Means there are cases when they go for only the low hanging fruit.

Return on Investment

  • Saves time spent on regression - internal resources can focus on more important tasks.
  • Saves money on device / OS coverage.
  • Price for a bug fixed is lower than price for a bug hot fixed.

Usability

Love for the Applause, Applause

Incentivized
Justin McSweeney
Sr. Development & QA Manager in Engineering at EverFi (51-200 employees employees)

Pros

  • Fast ramp-up - minutes after activating a test cycle I will see testers jumping in, starting discussions in chat, and logging defects found.
  • Able to test on every device we've ever asked for.
  • Expertise in areas like scripting and test automation, accessibility, and more.
  • Good integration with our JIRA defect tracking system.
  • A great test team lead assigned to a test cycle to vet and approve bugs entered by test team members.
  • Videos attached to defect reports when screenshots don't cut it.

Cons

  • Defect reports can at times be confusing or not quite up to the standards we have internally but video attachments almost always clear up any confusion.
  • At times I'll find a limitation with the platform but so far I've always found a workaround, and they are making continual improvements to the platform.

Return on Investment

  • By using Applause we could forgo hiring full time specialists, which could be costly not to mention the interview process would take considerable time.

Applause for Applause

Todd Miller
Project Manager in Test in Information Technology at Boeing (10,001+ employees employees)

Pros

  • Applause was able to accomplish what our internal test team could not. We had an international issue that was occurring with customers in Colombia that we could not reproduce or simulate through a VPN. Calling in Applause, they were able to quickly find testers in that country with the specific cell phone carrier that we needed. The testers there quickly replicated the problem and from there we were soon able to create a fix.
  • Finding testers through the Applause ecosystem in International areas and throughout a variety of demographics allows for us to more effectively simulate real world usage as we load test against our applications.
  • Applause was able to find many more authentic localization issues that a third party localization company missed. Having real-world testers from Applause that really understand the language from a native speaker perspective, helped us to find many additional issues after our initial localization builds were handed off.

Cons

  • Some testers are not well versed in the platform. This is the exception.

Return on Investment

  • Improved test coverage on multiple devices and in international areas where our software applications are released.

The Amazing Applause!

David Hambardzumyan
Director of Quality Assurance in Quality Assurance at ROK Mobile (11-50 employees employees)

Pros

  • They are always quick to answer your questions and are helpful whenever you need something.
  • They have great testers that follow the guidelines and make it easier for clients to manage their issues.
  • They will always keep in contact and ask for your feedback to make their services even better!

Cons

  • One feature that I can see so far that needs to be improved is the way that the video submissions are handled. Because every time you try to open up a video on a bug submission you either need to download a big file or sometimes it does not open up.

Return on Investment

  • It keeps making our product better and better by receiving feedback from the testers.