Twitter software applications prone to crashes, tests show
What if you had a really good Tweet and got cut off in mid-sent . . .
Twitter, the popular social-networking site, has elevated spur-of-the-moment commentary and outbursts to must-have business strategy and political tactic. But some users are finding their best work is going unheard because the software applications they use are buggy and can crash.
A Southborough software testing company evaluated the reliability of programs that allow users to participate in the social-networking world by turning to another social phenomenon of the 2.0 age: “crowd-sourcing:’’
UTest Inc. asked professional software testers to spend a week vetting programs that allow users to Tweet from other applications. More than 600 testers from 29 countries took part.
The results? Testers found more than 300 software problems, 20 percent of which were serious enough that uTest said they required immediate attention, because they could crash the programs.
The programs tested included TweetDeck, Seesmic Desktop, and twhirl. These provide users with widgets and other tools that allow them to participate in social-networking conversations right from their desktops while offering conveniences such as filters, search tools, and the ability to post status updates on other social-networking websites, including Facebook.com.
TweetDeck (it works on Windows, Macintosh, or Linux-based computers) had 77 problems, 13 percent of which uTest classified as major defects, or “show stoppers’’ that could cause the application to crash or create some other functional problem. Seesmic had 16 of the 80 problems uTest categorized as serious, while 16 percent of the 61 bugs found in twhirl were classified as major.
Sean Sposito can be reached at ssposito@globe.com. 