INTRODUCTION
Crowdsourced testing or Crowd testing is a new age testing activity that is rapidly growing in popularity across the world. Due to the Pandemic, organizations and their respective employees had been forced to work remotely. In this wake, crowd testing has gained enormous buzz around it in the professional testing circle. Crowd testing is the process of carrying out testing of an application or a program or a tool for identifying the bugs, by a decentralized and diversified team of testers, who work collectively and remotely to test the applications developed by the production team, by converging their efforts, skills, expertise and technologies.
Due to the sheer brilliance, flexibility and potential to reduce costs, the practice of Crowdtesting has been now put to implementation by many big corporations like Google, Facebook and TCS. Wherever this idea is implemented, results were very promising in terms of costs reduction, risk evasion and increasing the testing efficiency. Crowdtesting is proved to be more beneficial and efficient than in-house testing in many ways. Let’s quickly have a look at the top 10 reasons why you should opt for crowdtesting rather than in-house testing.
FUELS THE DIVERSITY IN EXPERTISE & SKILLS:
The huge diversity and distinct set of perspectives witnessed in a crowd testing environment is a result of employing a diverse group of testers possessing a disparate level of expertise, locations, ethnicities and demographic groups.
Crowdsourced testing enables a person to gather the testing expertise across the world and put that to use for developing software without worrying about the needed manpower and operational infrastructure. In conventional testing, where a limited number of professionals are involved in finding the faults, the rate of finding defects is comparatively very low. Unlike Conventional testing, in crowd testing, the diversity in the testers’ experience, skills and strength areas helps the rate of identifying defects skyrocket.
CROWD TESTING HELPS IN REDUCING COSTS:
Thanks to the remote working feasibility, work flexibility and diversity of the personnel, crowd testing burns a smaller hole in the pocket of the company owner in terms of expenditure towards testing. Crowdsourced testing makes it possible to acquire testing talent across the globe. Irrespective of nation, language and education, the company literally can hire any tester just based on the tester’s skills and work requirements. This helps in curbing the costs via crowd testing, which can’t be done in the case of traditional testing. It helps in finding even the most critical of bugs that would have gone overlooked in in-house testing. Also, crowd testing helps in increasing the pace of work completion, as the crowd simultaneously works to find defects in the software developed by the development team and constantly pushes the development team to rectify the defects and give out the finished output within no time. Otherwise, the development team has to take many breaks in their development activity to find defects and rectify defects, which would hamper the quality of work and slow down the entire process. Ex-director of google, James Whittaker claimed the same, that they have saved 12- 15 % of costs by using the crowd for testing.
HELPS IN FINDING TESTERS, TO WHOM YOUR WORK IS A PRIORITY:
The world is busy, just like its inhabitants! Now and then we listen to people complaining about the load of pending work even after extended work engagement periods, overstretched office timings and insane working hours, which is an undeniable fact. With crowd testing, one can make the most out of human resources and skilled personnel, by splitting the work into tiny chunks and distributing them to the testers across the world. This would enable the professionals to take care of the testing activity in their leisure or at times suitable for them to complete the work with undivided attention and care.
CROWDSOURCED TESTING KEEPS APPLICATION FAILURES AT BAY:
Crowd testing helps in testing a program or a software or a tool in real-world situations and with real-world problems. We can’t expect a program to be tested with diverse and real-world conflicts in in-house testing. It helps in getting a very clear picture of the overall performance of an application under critical or extreme conditions as critical bugs won’t go unchecked in crowd testing.
Application Testing Services
Application testing services or app testing is one of the predominant services offered by crowd testing.
App testing indeed is a tedious process, however, Crowdsource testing companies avail a temporary workforce for its execution.
Crowdsourced testing companies allow many companies to get their products and apps tested with a customer-centric approach.
Crowdtesting runs application security testing which is a process of making applications resistant to security breaches. The automation of Application Security Testing has made it much easier than ever and crowd testing makes use of a combination of several Application Security Testing tools to check the possible threats at each level.
Beta Testing Companies
Crowdsourced Beta testing companies allows the companies to troubleshoot their software(app testing) and helps in evaluating the acceptance of an app/software or a product.
These beta testing companies help you in finding any bugs and implementing the required updates at a relatively low cost.
HELPS COMPANY IN ACTIVE BUSINESS ACQUISITION:
As the crowd comprises many skilled people with diversified professional expertise and skills, they get to use and handle the latest technologies and tools for testing an application or software. If these cutting-edge tools and technologies are used for testing, it helps the company to thrive and stay in the business loops. Using these tools will help the company in the active acquisition of clients and business.
EFFICIENCY AND SCALABILITY
Crowdsourced testing helps to bridge the gaps between big corporations and starting up software companies, enabling the big corporations to outsource some of their testing work to the smaller corporations and helping the smaller corporations to earn revenues even without infrastructure and personnel to face the end customer. Crowdtesting also helps small corporations in training their personnel on how to deal with prestigious projects and exposing them to the latest tools and technological advances in testing. By creating bridges among corporations and professionals, CrowdSourced testing helps in increasing the operational efficiency of the corporations and attain sustainability.
Crowdtesting ensures smooth development of software, as hundreds of testers can be temporarily hired in a development cycle to simultaneously rectify the bugs in the software and notify the development team in no time. Thus, work gets completed with high efficient data at a very fast pace
PROVIDES FLEXIBILITY
One of the most talked-about benefits of Crowdtesting is the flexibility it offers. Having equipped with a community of professional freelance testers from all around the globe who are available around the clock the tests can launch at any preferred time.
Crowd Testing can aid you to effectively handle QA requirements that are on-demand typically when a release has to be made at a short notice. One can scale their QA efforts by investing relatively less time or a fraction of what it takes for an in-house QA team.
Companies like Apple and Microsoft are opting for crowd testing to reap its benefits. The crowdsourcing platforms also assist these companies to ensure secured access to their apps and data.
HELPS YOU UNCOVER NEW ISSUES
It is always possible to uncover new issues and obtain novel app insights with crowd testing as the community of crowd testers you’ll be working with devoid of any intrinsic bias, unlike an internal QA team. With a Crowd testing team, the chance of detecting new issues and bottlenecks is relatively high.
TESTING PLATFORMS AND BETA TESTING COMPANIES
Crowd testing platforms or Crowdsourced testing companies are those to which the software prototype or products are sent to get them tested by expert testers. With the emergence of a great number of crowd testing platforms, the practice of traditional testing is being slowly replaced. These testing platforms are furnished with the testing management platform, a global network of expert testers and robust client services.
There are platforms to boost a company’s digital performance that inevitably gives a competitive edge over others.
Conclusion
To conclude Crowd-sourced testing is a great way for software companies to leverage
the speed, localization, usability and staffing pool at large at a fraction of the price. The companies can now scale their resources, meet tight deadlines all while without compromising on the quality and security.
