You may think your favorite Twitter application—Tweet Deck, Seesmic or Twhirl, for example—is saving you time, but regardless of what you are using, it is likely riddled with bugs.
uTest’s most recent Twitter Apps Bug Battle found a total of 317 bugs across five applications, including Tweet Deck, Seesmic Desktop and Twhirl, with 20 percent of those bugs classified as “show stoppers”—defects in need of immediate attention.

Nonetheless, professional testers tended to rate these Twitter applications highly. Sixty-six percent of respondents rated both Tweet Deck and Seesmic Desktop as either good or very good in terms of overall quality. And 72 percent of testers gave Twhirl high rankings for usability.

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uTest notes that testers with more than three years experience overwhelmingly favored Tweet Deck across all categories, and Tweet Deck topped the list in terms of Best Overall Quality, Best Usability and Best Feature Set.

But the high number of bugs, and the high percentage of show-stopping bugs remains a  cause for concern because Twitter use has grown exponentially in the past year.

“Twitter users skyrocketed from 1.6 million to 32.1 million users this year,” says Matt Johnston, uTest vice president of marketing. “Since filtering tweets is of top concern, sophisticated Twitter desktop apps are also booming.”

Among the most popular apps, 77 bugs were reported in Tweet Deck with 13 percent classified as show stoppers. Thirty percent were technical, 56 percent were functional and 14 percent were related to the GUI.

In Seesmic Desktop, quality assurance engineers found 80 bugs and classified 20 percent of them as show stoppers.  Thirty one percent were technical, 50 percent were functional and 19 percent were related to the GUI.

In Twhirl, engineers found 61 bugs, of which 16 percent were show stoppers and 33 percent were “high severity.” Forty-four percent were technical, 38 percent were functional and 18 percent were related to the GUI.

Testers said the most valuable features across all the applications included easy access to Twitter applications such as retweet, favorite, reply and direct message; filtering by groups; and column or tab support for multiple searches, including trend searches.

Other Twitter applications that made the top five include Tweetr and Twitteroo.

The Bug Battle Testing called upon uTest’s community of quality assurance engineers to report the most compelling bugs they could find in one week’s time based on quality, usability and feature set. More than 600 engineers from 29 countries participated. Top tester Bernard Lelchuk of Israel was the top winner, reporting the most valuable bugs and providing the best testing feedback. He and several other QA engineers divided $4,000 in prize money.