You’ve created a product inspired by brilliant ideas and are ready to launch it. However, have you found every bug in your application? According to the customers, it could harm your reputation.
Negative online reviews are only a swipe away. The viral nature of social media is well known. Brands can easily be made or broken by it. Having your users test the application is great. But that’s not realistic.
Do we have any clever solutions at hand? yeah! Crowdtesting.
Successful brands around the world are increasingly using crowdtesting to create flawless products. It is a multi-platform testing strategy that is both affordable and practical.
Let’s explore more.
What is Crowdtesting?
Crowdtesting, or crowdsourced testing, is the quickest and most flexible way to ensure you release high-quality software quickly and confidently. Crowdtesting takes help from expert testing teams formed by a community of globally dispersed independent digital experts. These experts are highly skilled and available to start testing at any time, in any language, or device using any operating system.
These testers act as proxies for your customers, providing detailed, aggregated, and real-world feedback on the quality, user experience, and functionality of your digital assets.
To guarantee that you deliver delightful digital experiences to your end users the first time and every time, you must test your products and services in the real-world environments where they live, work, and play.
Why do crowdtesting?
Without hiring more staff, crowdtesting enables you to quickly scale to support the launch of new products or the expansion into new geographic areas. Check out the ways that crowdtesting can help your team increase quality and release velocity.
Fewer bugs and faster innovation
Rapid testing and feedback help QA teams keep up with an increasing development pace while enhancing quality, allowing you to launch higher-quality digital assets more quickly.
Improved Customer Experience
Improving your app’s performance and providing better customer experiences can boost conversion rates and encourage user retention.
Reduced Testing Costs and Efforts
You can increase test coverage using remote, distributed teams without incurring additional overhead expenses.
What is the Crowdsourced Testing Process?
Crowdsource testing essentially consists of 5 steps that you should carry out. These phases lay out the project objectives, assist you in creating a budget, and give you working options directly or indirectly with these testers.
- The Preparation Phase: you should specify your project’s objectives and your company’s needs, choose a budget, create test cases, and find the necessary talent.
- The Initiation Phase: Begin by defining the test cases, establishing the production environment, and recruiting crowd testers.
- The Execution Phase: Start by testing the process on various devices, and involve a team of supervisors to help and keep an eye on it regularly.
- The Evaluation Phase: Verify the results and prepare to deliver the final product while processing the testers’ payments.
- The Final Phase: Conclude the testing cycle for this project and show the user or your clients the entire project/product with all of the necessary functionalities.
Steps For Setting Up Crowd Testing For Your Product
The QA life cycle may include several steps. It is best to keep in mind these factors if you want to take advantage of a crowd-testing services.
Define a Goal
Why is crowdsourced testing necessary to begin with? What outcomes are you hoping for? What does a productive process entail for you? The experts will be able to find the best solution to meet all of your needs with the help of the answers to these questions. Additionally, it will help you save money, avoid confusion, and avoid pointless actions.
Identify Your Target Market
Who uses your digital product, exactly? What countries do they live in? What kinds of devices do they typically use? Have they got any unique demographics? You can choose the testers who will most accurately represent your target audience and behave like real customers by identifying and segmenting the potential users.
Create Advanced Descriptions
What is the plan for your QA tests? Have you got specific test cases? Do you favor utilizing only exploratory testing techniques? What information (numbers, bugs, indices, etc.) do you anticipate a crowd-testing team to provide? Remember to outline the deadlines, environments, and other requirements that may be useful in the process flow of crowd testing.
Identify the Weaknesses and Problem Areas
It is always a good idea to mention any problems you came across during the execution of the previous test, if applicable. Or, on the other hand, list the queries that are already known to you. The crowd-testing professionals will focus on examining the weak points of your digital product while avoiding reporting the known issues. This straightforward tip will help you double-check whether these issues occur when real users start using your app.
Employ a Project Coordinator
You can follow the crowd-testing life cycle with the help of an attentive project manager.
Benefits of Crowdtesting
Scalability
Do you require additional testing on short notice? Crowdtesting allows for immediate growth of testing efforts. It is advantageous if there is a need for a quick feature release. On-demand crowd testers are an option.
Cost savings
We can reduce costs since we didn’t hire any testers on a full-time basis. Testers from all over the world are available for hire. Since no significant investments are required, it is economical.
Speed
As you know, multiple test cycles increase our product confidence. Multiple test cycles are available through crowdtesting at any given time. Faster test insights and quicker time-to-market benefits follow from this.
Geographic Coverage
Global testers are available through crowdtesting. Crowdtesting makes it simple to find testers in any nation or region.
Device Coverage
Stop stressing out about buying emulators and device farms for testing. You can easily test on a variety of browsers and devices with crowdsourcing without making significant investments.
Disadvantages of Crowdtwsting
Confidentiality
By introducing new product features, you want to keep your competitive edge. Some of them might be confidential. It’s not a good idea to give it to outside testers in that situation. Crowdtesting should not be used in these circumstances.
Monitoring the Testing Effort
Organizing testers across time zones and different geographies can be tedious for crowdtesting companies.
The number of bugs
The goal of crowdtesting is to find the most bugs possible. In such exercises where incentives are given for detecting a huge number of bugs, there is a chance that the team may miss crucial functionality bugs.
Some Best Crowdtesting Platforms
Cobalt
Cobalt is a specialized PtaaS (Pentest as a Service) that can assist DevOps teams with their compliance and security needs. It offers high-quality testers and workflow integrations. GAT, on the other hand, offers a wider selection of pre-built integrations with software development and project management platforms so that your team can easily track bugs, work on fixes, and address known issues within your app.
Cobalt, a specialized service, only concentrates on a small area and lacks the expertise and range of options provided by GAT.
Global App Testing
GAT, the industry leader in web and app testing, combines crowdtesting and intelligent automation to ensure the quick completion of projects. They have a thoroughly vetted team of over 50,000 professionals and the ability to test in over 189 countries. It’s no surprise that GAT is used by global corporations such as Microsoft and Facebook. GAT provides quick testing and scalability to accommodate any project or timeframe.
QA Mentor
QA Mentor combines the experience of qualified testers with both onshore and offshore resources to offer ISO-certified QA services to all business levels. However, their focus on specific industries limits their applicability, while GAT offers to test for every industry type and is ISO-certified.
Rainforest
The crowdtesting and quality assurance platform Rainforest offers automated testing procedures through its AI-powered engine that can test any processes included in the project’s current workflow. However, potential users may be turned off by the platform’s complex setup process compared to GAT’s user-friendly software, which makes it simple to integrate your tech stack with its platform and boosts team productivity.
Bugwolf
Bugwolf is a SaaS platform that enables you to quickly put together a testing strategy and a team to find and track bugs. Its main objective is to find and track bugs. GAT is unrivaled in terms of service efficiency. It can execute manual test cases in between 30 and 150 minutes and perform exploratory testing in less than 36 hours.
Like some other solutions, Bugwolf is less appropriate for bigger projects or organizations because it lacks Global App Testing’s extensive experience.
The Role of Crowdtesting
Crowdtesting has emerged as one of the best ways to ensure digital quality for websites, mobile apps, and software. It involves real people testing the application or website in real-world conditions, using different devices in different locations and countries.
Crowdtesting is a tried-and-true method for testing products. It offers a realistic test experience and is effective in terms of both efficiency and cost. It does not, however, take the place of internal testing. Crowdtesting is an addition to existing manual and automated test procedures.
Crowdtesting platforms provide a community of testers that can test the content and functionality of an application or website under different conditions and real-world scenarios.
This process enables developers to identify errors and improve the overall quality of the product cost-effectively. Real-time feedback from the testers can help developers to make quick adjustments and changes to the development process, leading to faster and more efficient releases.
Therefore, crowdtesting is a great tool for developers to ensure the overall quality of their products before launch. By using crowdtesting to decrease the likelihood of bugs in your product, your chances of a successful, bug-free product increase.
