Crowdsourced testing: A smarter testing technique

Crowdsource testing is a breakthrough in the field software testing. It can be considered as the next level of testing. In this testing technique the application under test is made open for a large number of testers in different areas of the world, which will make the application tested under different devices, operating systems, geographical regions and all.

This testing technique is rapidly gathering momentum as it is more efficient and very cost effective. Usually the cost is depending upon the bugs find, which makes the process more result oriented than procedure oriented. It helps organizations to cut the budget on testing activities. There are many organizations offering crowdsource testing. In most cases the testers are volunteered as freelancers from the different parts of the world. It cannot be considered as a simple testing outsourcing since it’s far matured than simple outsourcing. In simple outsourcing the testers are from a same organization or area but in this case each tester will be from different part of the world which make a single tester a test scenario like different bandwidth, different altitude, different time zone, and so on.

In this age of technology where SAAS, cloud and mobile devices are the main area of focus, the crowdsource testing become more important. It is essential that the product should get a global exposure which can be simply accomplished by crowdsource testing.

Consider the case of a mobile application which depends on atmospheric conditions, time zone, GPS location, altitude and language. If the organization try to test the application, making testers to reproduce all the mentioned conditions is practically impossible with the in-house testing team. Even virtually creating the conditions is also impossible. Then there comes the importance of crowdsource testing. This testing not only makes all conditions covered but also provide cost and time effective guaranteed results as the cost is only for valid bugs reported.

There are some disadvantages of crowdsource testing

• Confidentiality become an important concerns since a large number of testers are accessing the application
• Immediate communication with all testers become a hard task
• Managing the crowd testers is difficult
• Ensuring test coverage is had since conventional test plans and method are hard to implement
• Exploratory testing leads to lack of documents for reference
• Validating bugs become a difficult task