Crowd-Sourced Testing 101: A Game-Changer for QA

Magicminds

Magicminds Team

Posted On: 7 Nov 2023

6 min reads

Crowd Testing: A Brief Introduction

Crowd-sourced testing or crowd testing is a software testing process involving QA professionals, overcoming the traditional testing ritual. A large group of individuals– QA professionals around the globe participate in the testing process.

Besides, crowd-testing leverages multiple skills, opinions, ideas, and perspectives of a diverse tester community, avoiding depending solely on the in-house team of testers.

Crowd-sourced testing shares testing-related tasks and principles with the ‘crowd’ who then undertake the testing journey individually on different platforms, configurations, devices, etc., for accurate results.

So, who is involved in the crowd testing mainly?

Undoubtedly, quality assurance (QA) testers are the superstars of different locations worldwide. As multiple broader minds come together and do a test under different circumstances, this empowers crowd testing with a powerful testing approach.

Now, is crowd testing bearing the end of the internal testing team’s end?

The answer is a big NO!

Crowd testing can not replace the in-house testing team. Most of the time, an internal testing team is essential, especially in providing help to the crowd-testing providers in terms of business and product or service knowledge information.

Reasons to Opt for Crowd-Sourced Testing

If you choose crowd-sourced testing, you can get 24/7 around-the-clock availability and have more power in demographic control for testing purposes. Let’s uncover what are the benefits of crowd-testing.

Multiple Testers with Diverse Perspectives

Crowd-testing is your ticket to a pool of talented testers with vast knowledge and experience. This skilled team of testers around the world from diverse backgrounds, skills, and geography adds magic to the testing process, allowing you to resolve your product’s issues and test it from different user perspectives in one tap.

Scalability

Through crowd-testing, you can add scalability to your testing, maximizing the true potential of many professionals continuously.

Consider having crowd-testing done when you have a tight deadline to meet and your product requires to be tested in multiple devices, platforms, and configurations.

Cost-efficiency

Consider how much it would cost to hire an external expert to test every project. Sounds too costly, right?

But if you take crowd-testing into consideration, it would certainly cost you less in comparison to in-house tester team maintenance or external help. As crowd-testing has flexible pricing models, you can pay testers individually for that particular project or service only.

Flexibility

Crowd testing adds flexibility to the testing process regarding time and geolocation. Skilled professionals can join the testing procedure from anywhere and anytime in the world, which enables around-the-clock testing service.

This flexible feature of crowd-testing is better when your product requires maintaining different time zones.

Real-time Testing

Crowd-sourced professionals actually represent real users’ perspectives, providing real-time feedback and experiences based on their usage patterns.

This is particularly beneficial in understanding the usability problems and user experience drawbacks that might hamper an engaging experience.

Time-to-Market

Crowd-testing stimulates your product’s time-to-market phase. It involves around-the-world testers in large numbers, which, of course, increases the testing time.

This is important in software development cycles such as continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery or deployment (CD). This adds an extra layer of push to launch your product in the market effortlessly and on time with added and enhanced features.

Objective-oriented

Guess what’s one of the most crucial benefits of crowd-testing? Crowd-tester professionals work individually, and they are unbiased. This facilitates you to collect object-oriented, unbiased, and without preconceived notions feedback about your product.

You can not overlook it, as diverse perspectives lead to discovering critical issues that your in-house team might fail to observe.

Improved Test Coverage

By implementing crowd-testing, you can get broad test coverage from professionals of diverse locations, skills, devices, networks, operating systems, configurations, etc. This is impartial in resolving environment-oriented and platform-oriented problems that might affect the compelling user experiences.

Seamless Customer Data with Wide Publicity

Crowd-testing offers to collect customer data effortlessly, and as a business organization, you can try to understand your consumer demographic information through this.

This helps you to connect your brand with diverse customers, provide improved services, and gain a wide range of publicity across the globe, promoting your brand.

Who Can Use Crowd-Sourced Testing?

You will be astonished to know if we tell you that from startups to 500 fortune companies across the industries, keep faith in the crowd-sourced testing process.

Let’s briefly discuss who best benefitted from crowd-testing.

Mobile App Development

Dedicated mobile app developers depend on crowd-testing for validating the app development tests on multiple devices, operating systems, and network connections.

Many companies utilize this testing approach for customer retention and to provide a compelling user experience.

Website Development

Crowd-testing ensures that the company’s websites are user-intuitive, faster, functional, and compatible with multi-device websites smoothly.

A better example is Airbnb, which relies on crowd-testing for performance and usability tests.

Game Industry Solution Development

Crowd testing is widely accepted in gaming, providing game lovers with smooth, faster responses and excellent user experience.

Did you know Ubisoft and Electronic Arts use crowd-testing to identify and solve the issues before the game launches in the market?

eCommerce Development

Crowd-testing is a great tool in eCommerce platforms for streamlining users’ shopping experience across the globe.

A big name, Amazon, depends on this testing process for user-friendliness and usability checks.

eLearning Solution Development

eLearning platforms can enhance their usability, functionality, performance, accessibility, and video streaming quality with crowd-testing procedures.

We are sure you will be surprised that the top eLearning platform, Udemy, uses this testing process to enhance the user experience.

Consumer Software Development

Companies that build consumer software, like Adobe with Photoshop and Illustrator, rely on crowd-testing to validate features, performance, and functionalities.

Logistics Software Development

Logistics software, like FedEx and DHL, use crowd-testing to validate software efficiency and enhance the shopping experience.

Challenges of Crowd-Sourced Testing with Solutions

Till now, we have dealt with the reason for integrating crowd-sourced testing. However, crowd-testing does involve some crucial challenges that may seem difficult to overcome.

But of course, we will give you secret tips to deal with them. Taking those precautions, you can easily implement a crowd-testing approach. So, what are you waiting for? Stay hooked!

Diverse Culture

Shifting from in-house testing to working with diverse testers is never an easy task to accomplish. We know it is challenging as this may affect the team’s communication and collaboration process along with the productivity concern.

But how to overcome that?

Proposed Solution:

Clear and conceptualize the crowd-testing approach within your existing internal team members.
Of course, talk about the scopes, requirements, communication platforms and methods, and more.
You must define what you need to automate and what needs to be crowdsourced.

Quality of Testing

Identifying the appropriate resources for doing the crowd-testing is important to ensure successful testing. In fact, identifying the right methodology and tools and the proper testing expert in the domain is difficult.

So, how do you solve this?

Proposed Solution:

You must have proper and clear resource selection criteria. You can conduct an online test to understand their skills and expertise.
Create a knowledge-sharing session for better quality work.
Be familiar with the testing tools to execute the testing phase and monitor the progress.
Have adequate knowledge about crowd-sourced testing processes’ do’s and don’ts.

Security Issues

Security and confidentiality are the primary things for any company; oversharing or mishandling data during the test phase may lead to security issues and data concerns.

So, what steps to involve?

Proposed Solution:

Never ever and ever crowdsource high-sensibility business works.
Do not share the information required for the testing.
For crowd-testing resources, you must have online NDA approval.
Avoid sharing unmonitored conversations of crowd-testing teams with your internal team.

Knowledge Issue

Last but not least, knowledge management is difficult regarding crowd testing.

What are the necessary steps?

Proposed Solution:

Create a clear, precise, and strong knowledge repository.
Engage in proper monetary and non-monetary incentive steps for earning crowd resources loyalty.

Bonus Tips: Best Practices of Crowd-Sourced Testing

Yet not convinced? Still, have questions regarding how we can improve crowd-testing. Here are bonus tips for best practicing the crowd-testing software. Stay tuned!

Platform Selection

It goes without saying that selecting the right platform for the crowd-testing approach is undeniable. As the suitable platform marks crowd-testing success, choose a trustworthy and reputable platform or provider.

Bug Management

Bugs must be tracked and reported efficiently as they help document and resolve those bugs, enhancing the testing and custom software development experience. Of course, this assists developers in prioritizing the main issues first and starting to work on them on demand.

Effective Communication

We can not talk enough about the importance of effective and clear communication between the development team and QA testers. Crystal clear and concise conversations help detect issues and resolve them quickly, establishing crowd-testing a superhero.

Test Case Design

Appropriate test case design and implementation stimulate crowd-testing. Test cases obviously seamlessly include functionality, usability, performance, and security aspects.

Timely Feedback

On-time feedback and responses provide motivation and encouragement to the testers, which improves the testing quality and covers all the issues smoothly, taking action immediately.

Should You Implement Crowd-Sourced Testing in Your Organization?

This is a prevalent question nowadays; businesses have whether they should opt for crowd-testing or not. Honestly, crowd-testing is essential in case of a small QA team’s enhancement, bringing diverse, talented, and skilled testing professionals to one place and promoting fresh perspectives and feedback. Crowd-testing can scale up tests, stimulating the testing capabilities efficiently.

If your business has limited QA resources, consider implementing crowd-testing when a big release is due. Crowd-testing can increase the scope with wide test coverage and provide timely feedback from user perspectives.
Moreover, you will find this testing procedure is excellent when your product is having complex problems and your in-house team is facing difficulties in covering all the possible user cases before a big release.

Conclusion

To conclude, crowd-testing can add an extra layer of value while stimulating the entire testing process. However, it is not a miraculous drug to fix the testing issues. So, you must have a carefully defined plan before implementing crowd-testing. You can have a dedicated software service team for developing your software and testing the product easily.