What is Crowdsourced Testing?

Crowdsourced testing leverages a global community of testers to bring in diverse perspectives, extends test coverage, and speeds up testing.

Traditional mechanisms of testing work quite well but sometimes are not able to catch diverse scenarios and real-world use cases that a user may go through. This is where crowdsourced testing comes into play.

The article will cover what crowdsourced testing entails, its advantages, and how to make it a valuable addition for your software development process.

Understanding Crowdsourced Testing

Crowdsourced testing is a method of software testing that allows the utilization of a large number of testers with diversified experience from all over the world to identify bugs, usability issues, and other defects in a certain software application. Testers may be professionals or amateurs or even end-users who will provide different points of view in different dimensions.

Crowdsourced testing draws on collective intelligence from a crowd with diverse experiences that may not be captured from an internal testing team. The regular means through which the testers are engaged is an online platform where they receive tasks, execute tests, and report findings. In general, crowdsourced testing will be effective during most stages of development, right from early development to some considerable time after deployment.

Key Characteristics of Crowdsourced Testing

• Global Diversity: The tests are crowdsourced, tapping into a global pool of testers with different backgrounds and cultural experiences. This helps identify and nip in the bud issues that might be encountered probably by an end-user group.
• Real-World Scenarios: Testers operate in natural environments on various devices, using various operating systems and network conditions, providing insight on how the software performs under these varied contexts.
• Scalability: One of the major benefits of crowds is that scaling up or down, depending on the needs for testing, can be really flexible for projects of any size. .
• Speed: Crowdsourced testing has the potential to seriously speed up how long any given testing cycle takes, because a team of multiple testers works simultaneously across different time zones.
• Cost-Effectiveness: While crowdsourcing saves one from maintaining a large in-house testing team, testing will be engaged only when needed, hence more cost-effective than usual.

Crowdsourced Testing Process

Crowdsourced testing deploys a global group of testers who deliver assurance for software applications. Key activities involved in crowdsourced testing are as follows:

• Definition of Objectives and Budget: Establish objectives related to the scope of the testing required and determine a budget.
• Selection of Collaboration Model: Decide whether interacting directly with the testers is preferred or utilizing third-party services such as Global App Testing is better, which offers different tiers of management.
• Choosing Testers: Testers are selected to work on the project based on their profiles, which include experience and skills. Sometimes, a pre-test is necessary to evaluate their qualification.
• Inform Them of Your Expectations: Give the testers comprehensive test plans and reporting criteria to understand what needs testing.
• Keep Them Informed: Update through forums or direct messaging during the testing phase. Review all the feedback and bugs reported by the testers, focusing on the most critical ones.
• Evaluate Testing Process: Once the testing has been completed, prepare feedback in terms of effectiveness and efficiency related to crowdsourced testing for future projects.

When to Use Crowdsourced Testing

Crowdsourced testing is particularly effective in specific scenarios where traditional testing might fall short:

• Cross-Browser and Cross-Platform Testing: When your application needs to be tested on a wide range of devices, browsers, and platforms, it is in these cases where crowdsourced testing can quickly provide the needed coverage.
• Localization Testing: For products intended for deployment with multiple regions and languages, crowdsourced testing can be utilized to help ensure the software operates as intended and is sensitive to the culture of the particular location.
• Usability Testing: When real-world feedback concerning the user experience is necessary, crowdsourced testing has the advantage of offering insight from a wide array of users who interact with an application in various ways.
• Post-Release Testing: Crowdsourced testing following deployment offers an effective opportunity for the detection of issues that were not caught during the early testing phases or are otherwise realized in real conditions.

Comparison of Crowdsourced, Outsourced, and In-House Testing

Each testing methodology, however, has its own set of benefits, which may favor one over another for your particular needs in a given project:

• Crowdsourced Testing: Scaled and with a great range of testing environments, perfect for global application testing.
• Outsourced Testing: One finds coherence in the team, possibly backed by expertise and skilled resources but lacking the diversity and scalability crowd can provide.
• In-House Testing: Provides extensive product knowledge and quality checking, but is rather expensive. Additionally, it is less flexible during peak demand periods.

Crowdsourced testing has certain advantages in the reproduction of diverse real-world scenarios, which may be quite problematic for in-house or outsourced teams. Based on the ambition level and project complexity, making proper choices of the type of testing can make a huge difference in efficiency and completeness for your software testing.

The Advantages of Crowdsourced Testing

Crowdsourced testing comes with many complementary benefits to enhance traditional testing. Here is how this can make a difference for your software development process:

1. Enhanced Test Coverage: Crowdsourced testing offers wide coverage of various devices, operating systems, and environments. An application gets tested on scenarios that might not be considered or available in-house. That is absolutely handy for mobile applications where many combinations of constructive devices, along with different OSs, provide unexpected bugs.
2. Access to Diverse Skill Sets: The crowd is global, comprising testers with various levels of experience and specialization. Thus, whether it be security testing, localization testing, or usability testing, skilled testers are available who can address those particular needs.
3. Faster Time-to-Market: With crowdsourced testing, the whole testing process can, therefore, be accelerated by having hundreds of testers working on a product concurrently. In particular, this pays off in Agile environments where rapid feedback is needed to match fast-paced development cycles.
4. Real-World Feedback: Since many of the testers are end-users or very similar to the target audience, the feedback offers value for insight into how users will interact and view your product. This might be useful in finding out the usability issues that one may not observe in a typical testing environment.
5. Cost-Effective Testing: In the case of crowdsourced testing, you pay for testing services only when needed since there will be no overhead cost related to maintaining a full-time testing team. For this reason, it will be a cost-effective solution, especially for smaller firms or startups.
6. Unbiased Testing: Since these external testers are new to the products, they’re supposed to rid the testing of biases an internal team is likely to possess. It has a way of coming up with issues perhaps internal testers wouldn’t catch.

Best Practices for Crowdsourced Testing

These best practices will help you fully realize the benefits of crowdsourced testing:

1. Define Clear Testing Objectives: Before you go out to engage with the crowd, you need to clearly define your objectives from testing. Specify what areas of the application need to be tested, what types of issues should be looked at, and what the expected outcomes are.
2. Select the Right Crowd: Choose a crowd that matches your needs of testing. Take for instance a case where one is trying to test a mobile application; this should be done by ensuring that the crowd to be selected has people who can access a variety of mobile devices and operating systems.
3. Provide Detailed Instructions: Even though crowdsourced testing seems pretty flexible, it is extremely important to clearly give testers instructions regarding what to expect from the test. This includes details on the steps they should take, what they will look for, and how these findings should be reported.
4. Use a Reliable Platform: Use reliable crowdsourcing so as to carry out the tasks of facilitation of communication, task management, and reporting. The platform should avail the progress of testing and the results in real time as one performs monitoring.
5. Incorporate Feedback Loops: Establish feedback loops where there will be communication about the findings by the testers, as well as questioning, and clarification. This ensures that the issues are understood correctly for rapid resolution.
6. Combine with Traditional Testing: Crowdsourced testing works best when used in conjunction with traditional testing. Crowdsourced testing extends internal processes and fills in any test coverage gaps.

Conclusion

Crowdsourced testing is a powerful means of gaining major advantages for your software development process. You’ll be able to get wider test coverage, find critical issues, and ensure your product behaves well in the real world by engaging diverse testers from every corner of the world.

Whether you’re launching a new product or improving an existing one, crowdsourced testing, supported by Testscenario, can provide the comprehensive and reliable testing you need to succeed in today’s competitive software market. Contact us today, and let’s take your product quality to the next level.