Is it worth trying Crowd Testing?

Why should you try Crowdsourced testing?

Here is a list of reasons why trying crowdsourced testing is important for your app development portfolio and road map.

Crowdsourced testing is an emerging trend and is a very effective method of quality assurance testing of your software product by leveraging on a diverse but temporary team of people with some expertise, through a software platform in the areas of the software you want to test.

This crowd could be made up of generic app users, technical staff, experienced product managers, team members, or even sales teams.

 Value of Crowdsourced Testing

Crowd testing is a very good strategy to implement when you are exploring business alternatives to optimize your testing operations in terms of value, cost, and efficiencies.

Crowd testing also helps you to provide a new perspective and a more objective, non-biased feedback on the software since the crowd is most often made up of people who are not involved in the development of your software.

This feedback can be a very critical aspect and important in providing the best user experience and ensuring that the product provides the intended satisfaction.

 Bridging the Trust Factor

A potential concern that comes up when using crowd testing is that of trust and you have probably thought about it already. What does this mean? You will probably have concerns over the confidentiality of your software and the reliability of these crowd testers.

There is often a general concern over trust when it comes to outsourcing a service. Some testers may not communicate in a timely and clear manner. Some may provide unreliable software feedback, while others may attempt to steal vital information from the product’s functionality.

To ensure the highest levels of trust its best to consider crowd testing platforms that provide the best assurances while also monitoring the community of testers, as compared to freelancers. Usually, these platforms have legally binding agreements with the testers. So, any quality or security-related concerns can be escalated to the platform owners, who would ensure these escalations are resolved

 Project Managing Crowd Testing

To get the best out of crowdsourced testing, it is important to use the most suitable model and best approach when project managing your test execution process with the crowd. One significant aspect is whether you’d like the crowd testers to use your test infrastructure or can they test your app with their own mobile devices or laptops. If security is a concern, then this is a decision that rests with your internal security team’s approval and goes ahead.

These testers can be granted access to the software by using a crowd testing platform and perform software tests following your request. The test can be one that is exploratory or very specific about a certain functionality. These testers then compile feedback from the software test which will mostly be bugs and functional defects and share it with the project manager who can then relay it to the in-house development team.

No matter which model you choose, as a project manager you’d still need to track your test cycle reports based on your app version releases, which means the usual project management guidelines apply to your project.

However, one point to remember here is that through crowd testing, it’s practically impossible to engage with your crowd on a regular basis, which means you’ll have to depend on the test execution reports from the crowd as an outcome.

So, if it’s in your style of being comfortable with outcome-based test reports then you’ll need to take advantage of the crowdsourced testing model.

 How valuable are Exploratory Testing Results?

When approaching testing as part of the software or app development cycle, there is hardly any time left in most scenarios and often the test specs are quite poor or not available at all. This is true especially when your software cycles are on an agile methodology.

The best option in such scenarios for product and project managers is to exploit opportunities that crowd testing presents. The crowd will perceive your app as a real user and exploratory test results from them will provide you with valuable inputs into how intuitive your app is from the users’ perspective.

How does this help you? Quite simply it’s a hands-on approach with maximum test execution and minimum planning, which benefits you by receiving unbiased test results, at the quickest time and optimal costs from the crowd.

 Importance of Pre-Launch App Testing with Crowdsourced testing

Crowdsourced testing is the best solution for pre-launch mobile app testing because it helps you, beta test your app with a set of real users to identify possible shortfalls before launching the app in the market.

Quite often the app pre-launch tests are done in-house, which implies the app is being evaluated with a certain level of bias. This is unfortunate but true, with almost all app development organizations, the reason being that the development team isn’t open to making any last-minute functionality changes on the app, and so they are inclined to only receiving performance-related testing feedback. Making changes to functionality would delay the launch and will also run up development costs for the organization.

On the other hand, with Crowd testing, the crowd isn’t involved with your app development process and come in only for the testing phase, exhibiting behaviors similar to that of true users of your app. You also have the privilege to get your app tested on multiple devices in a real-world scenario.

Carrying out crowdsourced testing before the launch of your app can help you fix bugs and functionality issues which may pose a challenge to the seamless use of your app after release.

Imagine you wouldn’t want to be rushing with in-house beta testing just to launch your app in the market on time and then to find out app adoption suffers because of functionality issues with your real customer’s. This would disastrous for your app.

Importance of UX Feedback from Testers

UX feedback about your app from testers is another key input which you may not be able to validate with the traditional app testing methods. This information helps ensure that you release a very user-friendly product to your end users during the launch. UX feedback or user feedback can help you understand how people use your product and for what purpose.

Does such feedback provide answers to whether they use your app for the purpose for which you intended it to be? Does the product get maximum utility? And if not, why? Are the users happy using your app or does it frustrate them? These are very important questions that feedback from crowd testing your app can help provide answers to.

 In conclusion, user or your customer satisfaction is the cornerstone of your business and a well-thought-out and rightly executed crowd testing strategy can help provide you with all the important information needed to create a product that people want to use and are happy using.