Rainforest, a Y Combinator company, has developed an on-demand service that runs functional tests against a crowd of people through Mechanical Turk, Amazon’s crowdsourcing platform. The service is similar to how a customer can use Amazon Web Services to spin up and down instances. But in this case a customer makes an API request for people instead of machines.
The company is also working toward developing ways to seek out workers through private groups to suit companies that have NDAs and bound by regulatory issues.
With Rainforest, the customer can scale the QA work up or down, depending on what they want tested. Customers write tests in plain English, the requirements they have, and then the service takes people through a series of steps to run the tests that the customer wants performed. For example, a customer can ask a simple question about the layout of a site and get it tested in real-time.
