Crowdsourced Testing: 19 reasons why you should

Google, Apple and Microsoft have practically given away their Software Development tools for free. This move has created a growing community of developers who are creating killer mobile Apps and responsive web sites for these platforms, unfortunately the developers massively underestimate the overheads involved to successfully build, test and monetize these killer products.

Crowd testing helps cut costs, the savings from which is better spent on marketing/promotion to grow their customer base. Here are xx reasons why Developers should utilize the availability of Awesome Testers from around the world and choose “Crowdsourced testing” to cut costs, deliver faster with better test coverage.

1. Concentrate on Core Competences
Maximum value is derived if each party focuses on its core competence. According to this theory, developers, whose core competence is in product development, should focus their efforts on those activities and leave software testing to experts that have specialized in those activities. Through this symbiosis, maximum value could be extracted.

2. Better Financials and Cash Management
Crowd testing helps manage finances better and improves financial ratios, largely by translating fixed costs (employee salaries, allowances, etc.) into a usage based variable costs.

3. Risk Elimination
Crowd testing transfers costs and risks associated with activities around testing and test personnel management to an external service provider. Doing so eliminates several overheads and allows more focus on core value-adding activities, improved speed to market, agility, etc.

4. Improved cash flow
The CrowdTesters “pay-per-bug” ensures that Testers are working hard to discover all possible bugs and this model generates way more activity  compared to an in house team on hourly rates.

5. Market Validation
For developers, crowd testing serves another important purpose – they could quickly evaluate and validate whether their product addresses any or all pains their target customers face. They could progressively reach out to a select segment of testers, gather invaluable feedback and use these inputs to validate their business justification. Informal testing, as presently done by many sole developers and young startups through their network of friends and acquaintances is dangerous at best. In real world, the actual users of your product are largely intolerant to product faux pas. They may never be open to trying your product again or in worst case, may leave a negative rating that is pretty challenging to erase.

6. Ultimate Flexibility
CrowdTesters periodically rotate their crowd testers within projects – a flexibility beyond the realms of companies with dedicated in house testing teams. The benefit of this approach is to overcome any “blind spots” that testers face from prolonged exposure to an application. Over time, they usually can predict what could go wrong with a particular application and inadvertently concentrate their efforts around a subset of issues (much like in house teams), while other material issues in the larger testing sample space may escape their attention. CrowdTesters overcomes such predictability by periodically moving personnel across projects, so the testers cannot grow too familiar with a specific product or application.

7. Fresh Perspectives
Professional testers, who see and evaluate your application for the very first time, bring in fresh perspectives to improving your product’s quality. For complex products or services that mandate ongoing learning, crowd testing companies deploy professional testers that demonstrate a deep understanding of your product as required. In short, crowd testers make excellent critics of your products and are best included as part of your development cycle.

8. Usability Experts
Crowd testing helps uncover usability issues much earlier than when the application hits a distribution repository. Once an App is on the Apple or Google Play store, most customers won’t bother to submit crash reports, but simply give the App a low rating, which is incredibly hard to repair. Crowd testing helps overcome these negative aspects by placing the application in the hands of usability experts, whose insights contribute to product and usability improvements, thereby raising an application’s chances of adoption by the target audience.

9. Extensive Test Coverage
Unit testing and other traditional forms of testing activities, which are normally performed alongside software development, cannot cover all permutations of devices and system configurations, deployment scenarios and usage patterns. Many technical issues and bottlenecks only come to light only when the product is “in the wild”. Crowd testing emulates real world conditions and uncovers bottlenecks and issues much earlier, when it’s relatively easy and inexpensive to fix those issues.

10. Speed and Flexibility
The crowd testing community almost always helps discover most critical bugs in relatively a very short span of time. For example, Facebook crowd translated their website to French within 24 hours. Crowd testing is a flexible and smart way of scaling your test workforce at short notice. Crowd testing proffers the means to ramp up expert testing personnel; with pay-per-use pricing model developers pay only for those issues uncovered as part of the testing cycle, leading to marginal costs and increasing returns per testing cycle.

11. Comprehensiveness
Crowd testing eliminates any intrinsic bias, characteristic of a local testing team and adds richness and diversity. As different testers may follow different paths to localize an issue, such a multipath approach leads to more bugs discovered in a shorter time span, resulting in better software quality.

12. Professionalism and Expertise
Crowd testers are professionally qualified enthusiasts marked by an intrinsic motivation to discover bugs and improve software quality. These professionals are unsparing in their feedback and make excellent development partners.

13. Level Playing Field
The benefits of crowd testing model has already been appreciated and leveraged by established software giants the likes of eBay, Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Facebook. For example, 9 million testers downloaded Microsoft Office 2010 (Beta), who provided 2 million valuable product improvement ideas. Google regularly deploys crowd testing for 14 of their major product lines. Drawing upon the best practices and success stories from crowd testing, companies of various scales could now play alongside these giants in smarter, intelligent and innovative ways.

14. Sanity check
Developers can quickly test whether their application addresses customers’ pain points and validate the business hypothesis by targeting a select audience, gathering feedback and estimating the chances of adoption.

15. Test coverage
In-the-lab software testing, normally performed alongside development, cannot cover all devices and system configurations, deployment scenarios and usage patterns. Many technical issues and bottlenecks only come to light when the product is ‘in the wild’.

16. Speed
The crowd will help discover most critical bugs in a very short time span due to much larger numbers (often factor 10-20) of testers engaged in a test. Many case studies show that crowd testing can discover hundreds of issues within less than two days in applications which have passed internal QA!

17. Expertise
Crowd testers are professionally qualified enthusiasts marked by an intrinsic motivation to discover bugs and improve software quality. These professionals are unsparing in their feedback and make excellent development partners.

18. Well proven
Crowdtesting has already been used by likes of eBay, Amazon, GE, Microsoft, Google and Facebook to develop user-centric products. Google regularly deploys crowd testing for 14 of their major product lines.

19. Availability / Scalability
Crowd Testing brings the ultimate in Tester availability and scalability. Mobilise teams of Testers at 24 hour’s notice that are scalable from 1 to 1000+ testers who can “bash your product for bugs”. Teams are made up from Testers from around the world which essentially means that teams can work around the clock to deliver faster with better test coverage over devices, OS and locations at less cost.

Read more: Crowdtesters.com FAQ's