Testathon, The World’s First Hackathon For Testers

Hackathons have become one of the most common things on earth. You can find them in every city, wherever you go. Nowadays, the only difference between hackathons is the range of what you can win. There are rich events where you can end up winning more than $50,000 by developing an app or a very basic product, which sounds a lot given the time slice that is always less than two days. In the same way, there are also companies that have based their business model on organising hackathons.

The question is “are they the only way of entertainment?”. Why can’t we create an event for people who don’t want to develop but actually try the products? The answer is Testathon, which is the world’s first hackathon for testers. Developers are having a lot of fun by hacking code and creating things, but testers keep wondering if they can have a similar event.

The Global App Testing team found a solution in order to satisfy the needs of testers to be actively involved in competitions such as hackathons. Testathon will be an event just for testers who are willing to improve their skills and find new ways of discovering bugs. It’ll take place on Saturday the 25h from 10.30am - 7pm in London.

The event is aiming at gathering the best testers available and to let them test three apps for less than 24 hours, without stopping. 50 testers will be testing apps from TaskRabbit, SongKick and King (the makers of Candy Crush Saga). There will be £10k+ in prizes for individuals and teams who find bugs.

As Owais Peer recalls, the Testathon is gaining a lot of traction and they are expecting testers flying in from different parts of Europe, including members of Spotify’s testing team. As he says, the event is free to attend, there is just a vetting process to ensure the quality of the testers. For this reason, in the application process it’s required to say what the most unusual bug the tester has ever found.

Since the demand is growing, even before the first event, the organizers are thinking to hold different events, such as this one, in several other cities and countries. As you might have imagined, San Francisco is the next stop, where entrepreneurs and testers meet innovation.

I personally think it’s a great idea if there is a demand for it. People are willing to try different things and testing might be even more interesting than creating something in a small time frame. There is a reason why I have never been a great fun of hackathons and events such as startup weekend, because they force you to build something in a short period. When you are creating, you don’t need pressure and you have to do it because you like doing it.

However Testathon has nothing to do with it. It’s the place where developers meet testers, who are willing to find out what developers got wrong.