Testbirds introduced a new cloud testing product today they are calling TestChameleon.
The German company to this point has been known for offering crowd-sourced software testing. They have a group of 50,000 testers who will put your mobile apps and software through its paces and report back to you with the results. Each typically involves 25-50 testers looking at a specific problem, but the company started hearing from customers who wanted to be able test across a much richer variety of possible scenarios.
The company created TestChameleon, an automated approach to testing in contrast to a human-based crowd testing method. With TestChameleon, you can test against a number of variables including type and version of browser, operating system, Flash and Java, along with several other variables.

Customers have the option of using the public cloud or a private cloud version of the service inside an enterprise data center.
To test a desktop application, the customer can upload the executable package (for example .exe) and can then select it from the cloud interface. For automated web application testing, they would use the TestChameleon API to automate the process. The company has documentation on the site to assist you.
Once you select your testing criteria, Testbirds creates a virtual machine in TestChameleon and tests your software against the different variables you’ve chosen. If you have a typical set of criteria, you can create testing templates and then choose the pre-defined templates, saving you the time of making the same selections every time.
I took a look at a pre-release version of the site, which goes live today and the interface is clean and simple to use. You just click the options you want and Testbirds creates virtual testing machine for you based on your choices and runs against the software you are testing. When the process is complete, you get a report with the results.
Pricing starts at €49 ($61) per month for the public cloud plan with three tiers based on your usage, number of virtual machines and time spent running the tests. There is also an enterprise private cloud version starting at €1,399 ($1,741) per month.
Testbirds received €2.1 million ($2.9 million) Series A round, led by Seventure Partners in March. They also received an additional $350,000 grant from the German government.
