The world’s top brands such as Facebook and Microsoft, constantly launch, update, and wow their customers. Have you ever wondered how this is happening? Despite the fact that these huge corporations have their own internal Quality Assurance teams, crowdsourced testing is something that leveraged relatively new.
A growing trend in the software development industry, Crowdsourced testing is an evolving quality assurance (QA) testing approach that leverages a distributed, temporary workforce to test software applications rapidly and effectively.
Although traditional software testing approaches are performed within the organization or through an outsourcing contractor or a Quality Assurance consultant, crowdsourced software testing is carried by several individual testers at various locations.
In other words, crowdsourcing plays a crucial role in web development, and it certainly has advantages.
Launch Your Products Before Your Competitors Do
To compete in today's global market and create brand recognition, you need to be able to get your mobile app or website out and into the hands of the public as quickly as possible.
Once new features are developed, they need to be released at an extremely fast pace.
Crowdsourced testers give you the flexibility, for example for a large release, to scale up your testing efforts as needed, without recruiting additional staff. All the bugs that crowdsourced testers might find are being reported to the developers through the bug tracker frame.
Reduce Your Costs and Save Up Your Budget
The cost savings over using a fully in-house approach are, of course, one of the main crowdsourced testing advantages. Several factors affect the cost of hiring a full-time software tester such as location and experience.
It is not only time consuming, but costly to recruit an in-house team. The average wage is $55,457 for a software tester in the US and £24,000 in the UK. You can reach a huge crowd of expert testers, with a flexible price solution to meet your particular QA needs, by using a crowdsourced testing business.
Get the Insights from Your Target Audience
When penetrating global markets big brands are historically stuck with one approach - directly translating a mobile app or a website.
Merely translating one language to another became a simple process with the rise of machine learning and AI. Yet, translation does not deliver the outcomes that most businesses and brands are seeking. Localized insights are what businesses really want.
Certain functions within the application or website can actually affect the cultural effect of your brand on local people. Both these and other factors fall under the umbrella of localized insights. Most brands really need this data to scale their apps or websites in new locations, but the question remains: how?
Such huge brands such as Youtube, Spotify, Dropbox, and more utilizing the power of localized crowdsourced testing to get local insights from the specific country or many countries they are targeting. This makes them understand the local audience and eventually affects the way they build the product. Also, it helps to quickly engage in local markets without having a huge cost that they could possibly have with putting their own boots on the ground.
Test on the Devices You Want
Recent reports have pointed to a range of problems and challenges when developers use a traditional way to validate mobile applications inside a testing laboratory. The main problems are the following:
- a) testing costs are higher since there is a range of mobile devices and platforms that the product needs to be tested;
- b) large-scale user-oriented performance and usability testing is difficult to perform.
Crowdsourced testing offers a promising way of solving these problems and challenges.
Device diversity is the most critical element in mobile quality assurance: the opportunity to test the software on a huge variety of devices. This helps you find bugs unique to hardware and software that only affect those devices and their users.
Final Thoughts
Crowd testing is a proven and reliable technique for testing products. It is reliable, cost-effective, and provides a real-world testing experience. It is not, however a substitute for internal examination.
Crowd testing can be used as a complement to other manual or automated testing activities. In other words, crowd testing is reducing the probability of bugs in your software and improve the chances of bug-free product success.