Kristel Viidik is the co-founder and CEO of Testlio where she handles everything from answering every support e-mail to acquiring new customers and making them fall in love with Testlio.

What is Testlio?

Testlio is a full-service software testing solution. We remove the need to build an entire QA department in-house by partnering with our customers and assisting in managing their testing process using our community of top testers. … Our vision is to completely change how QA is done.

Many companies are afraid of outsourcing because the quality tends to suffer. However, compared to hiring your own testers in-house, outsourcing is much more affordable. At the affordable cost of outsourced prices, Testlio gives companies a dedicated team of software testers with years of experience collectively.

Why did you decide to build it?

I’m a professional tester. I was looking to do some testing on the side because it’s something I genuinely enjoy. I joined several of our competitors as a tester and found that their model rewarded the quantity of bugs caught rather than the quality of the findings.

Serious flaws quickly stood out. I didn’t feel like I was a part of the testing team for each app I worked on. Testers weren’t communicating or collaborating with one another. It was like we were testing in a vacuum.

This is important because creating a high-quality app is a team effort. Testers, developers, designers, and product all need to work together. Quality is everyone’s responsibility. Anyone can find the low hanging fruit, but if you really want to make an excellent app, everyone involved in the product has to work together.

To date, we are rapidly expanding our customer base and we pride ourselves on having a community of the top testers in the world.

How does Testlio use Firebase?

Firebase has been a significant part of our success in bringing together our awesome community of testers.

Communication between testers and customers is incredibly important on our platform. To facilitate this, we’ve created a real-time chat system using Firebase. If it weren’t for Firebase, creating this chat system would have been prohibitively difficult.

Testers and customers communicate on projects. It’s important that there aren’t any bug report redundancies on these project reports. We use Firebase to do real-time checks while testers are submitting a bug to prevent these redundancies from being submitted. This way, no one’s reports will be overwritten or duplicated.

Testers applying to Testlio have to go through a rigorous verification process. A part of this process is a mobile testing game we’ve created. This game serves as a quiz to assess the applicant’s testing skill. We use Firebase to keep track of each applicant’s progress in the game and entire application process.

What other technologies are you using?

Testlio is currently built with php, HTML5, node.js, socket.io and redis with AWS for hosting. However we are in the process of completely revamping our stack. In the very near future we will be using Koa, io.js, and React.

What are the most interesting use cases of Testlio that you’ve seen so far?

One of the features our customers love is App Store Reports. A lot of companies are interested in what their end users are telling them. App Store Reports aggregates the data from the app store and sorts them by feature and/or product areas so customers can see exactly what’s doing well and what needs improvement.

Testlio is also very popular for beta testing. Our platform makes it easy to add beta testers and customers receive all their reports in one place. Testlio has made this entire process super simple.

Do you have any exciting upcoming features you can share?

An exciting new feature is automation support: you write your test scripts on our platform and we take care of execution. All the results are available in Testlio and you’re immediately notified of any failures. We’re currently testing this feature with a few of our early customers and it will be available to everyone very soon.

We’re constantly improving our product. Not only are we completely changing our technology stack, but we’re also revamping our design, onboarding, and general UX of the product. We value user feedback more than anything, so if you have any suggestions please tweet them to us @testlio or e-mail us at hi@testlio.com