The Top Six Benefits of Managed Crowd testing

Many software development firms and app developers are now crowdsourcing their QA needs to increase efficiency, cut costs and get access to skilled resources.

It is indeed a fantastic approach. Crowdsourcing your software testing can save you on the infrastructure and technology costs, all the while making it easier for you to test software in real-world conditions when releasing it to a broad set of audiences.

Let’s explain this with an example.

Imagine this:

You are building the next big real-time social connection app for sports enthusiasts. The app lets you watch and participate in live discussions for any ongoing sporting event worldwide.

It would help if you had a comprehensive testing strategy because the app delivers its services in a whopping 20 different languages.

Imagine the scope of testing this app out in the real world. For starters, it’s an enormous project, and the software would be downloaded and used on various types of devices, on multiple OSs with different network carriers. QA for this software application will be tremendous, to ensure seamless compatibility and performance in any conditions.

So how do you test an app of this scale?

Enter Crowd testing.

Managed crowd testing is the new buzzword in the world of QA. Though crowdsourcing for other services such as design and content creation has been around for some time, crowd testing services is a reasonably new phenomenon.

Testing is all about finding gaps and glitches in your software product and fixing them. Crowdtesting is about leveraging the same testing efforts, albeit from a large group of dispersed temporary workforce. These temps are not an in-house testing team or an outsourced testing service provider.

In simple words, crowdsourcing your QA is putting your software product to be tested by real testers using real devices in different locations. It is a means to get some meaningful feedback to improve your product quality and add or enhance existing functionalities.

Advantages of managed crowd testing:

One of the biggest advantages of crowdsourcing your software testing is the added flexibility. The help from extra testing resources, be it people or devices, makes the software testing efforts worthwhile as software teams need it to render a dependable product.

Testing by real users

Browser and device fragmentation is one big challenge for app developers. For an application or software to run seamlessly across different operating systems, network carriers, and regional languages, it must be tested in such real environments.

Managed crowd testing overcomes these fragmentation challenges by picking the right mix of testers from different geographical zones, ideally suited to meet your testing requirements. A test lead can be appointed to preside over and supervise the collaborated efforts, thereby submitting a clean deliverable to you.

Real risk-free feedback

One of the key reasons why we test with real users is to garner honest feedback. And what better than crowd testing to understand your software solution’s efficacy out in the real world?

By crowd testing, you can consider the customer’s satisfaction with regards to user experience, software functionality, usability, compatibility, accessibility, and more. Thus, enabling you to find bugs faster and fix them quickly. Think of it as a soft launch but restricted to testers.

Better coverage at a lower cost

Crowd testing is one of the cheapest yet most valuable methods of getting your application tested by many QA professionals. It saves you mighty on the cost of testing and enhances your global reach with zero overhead and no travel costs. You won’t even have to pay for the devices because the testers use their own.

More leverage through global strength

Crowdtesting your application across the diversity of locations, local cultures, and regional languages allows it to be flawless for the real world.

When a large workforce is working independently 24/7 to fix faults in your application, you can rest assured you are building a reliable and scalable product for the masses. You can cut your testing time from months and days to mere hours.

Creates positive brand image

For an application to be well-liked, it needs to be flawless in terms of design and UX. In-house teams can often overlook, few testing failures, in pursuit of delivering within set deadlines. The final product is an unreliable application that can cost the company its reputation in the market.

When your software application is crowd tested, say by 25000 odd crowd testers, there is a negligible chance of any bugs slipping through and making their way into the final product. Thus, ensuring that you render a software product that enhances, not ruins, your brand image.

Launch better, faster

Many successful brands worldwide regularly incorporate crowd testing practices into their existing QA processes, simply for the benefit of launching within record time. It gives them the confidence to launch software with enhanced functionality, performance and deliver a reliable and high-quality product.

Takeaways:

With cutthroat competition in the market for developing reliable software and applications, there is undoubtedly immense pressure on QA teams to test faster and more efficiently.

Crowd testing steps in to achieve efficient testing and QA practices in a shorter timeframe. By combining the skillsets of multiple testers, it gives you a well-defined competitive advantage.

Managed crowd testing is a process that comes with its challenges. For starters, you need an experienced talent pool ready to disburse their services at your beck and call. Often, finding such talent can cost you time and money.

At Qualitest, we provide reliable managed crowd testing services to help you crush fragmentation challenges. We handpick the right mix of users and employ a dedicated test lead to oversee the testing and help you launch 10X faster. Get in touch to onboard a focused team of crowd testers and get your flawless application out into the market well before your stipulated deadline.

This Article is originally published at Medium.com

Anuj works for Qualitest Group- the world's largest testing services company.Qualitest’s global service delivery platform includes the United States, Israel, UK, India, Portugal and Romania.