What is crowdtesting, and what are its benefits?

Crowd tests offer speed, parallel testing, and hardware diversity, among other advantages. Individuals can provide an unbiased opinion of the products along the development cycle. In addition, it maximizes the human resources employed by the organization to assist the quality assurance team.  

In this article, you will know who can be involved in crowdsourced tests and understand the importance of crowd tests to businesses in this digital era. You can follow our guide on how to set up your crowd testing process. 

Let us dive deeper into the benefits of crowdsourcing. 

6 Benefits you should know about crowdsourcing 

Crowdsourcing entails reaching out to people outside an organization’s circle to gather ideas, reviews, and solutions. This knowledge is applied to complex systems development by large and small-scale businesses. Here are the benefits derived from crowdsourcing.

1. Cost-effective

To begin with, companies cannot afford to recruit experts to review every project product. With crowdsourcing, individuals can be paid and offered a reward for their contributions. Other costs incurred by employing the services of experts are not necessary with crowdsourcing.

2. Access to customer data

Customer data are gathered from crowdsourcing. Businesses can find this helpful in understanding their customer demographics. It assists brands in connecting with dedicated users across different locations. Marketing strategies can be further developed using the profile data acquired. 

3. Hands-off approach

Crowdsourcing offers flexibility. While crowdsourced members handle innovative thinking, managers and decision-making personnel can focus on their significant responsibilities. In contrast, traditional research and development methodology demands the supervision of the project crew.

4. Diversity thinking

Smaller-scale organizations may not be staffed with experts and professionals relevant to the challenge. A broader group of people are invited through crowdsourcing strategies. Gathering individuals with various opinions will birth different ideas and solutions to a problem. 

5. Wider publicity

Crowdsourcing challenges, innovative programs, and products can promote your brand and gain broader publicity coverage among customers in the global market.

6. Employment opportunities

Problem analytics and solving skills displayed can be an asset to the company. In addition, involving individuals outside the organization may proffer innovative strategies to challenges. These participants can be hired to work with the companies to achieve company objectives. 

What is Crowdtesting? 

Crowdtesting employs human skills to test software developments such as mobile applications, websites, internet of things devices, etc. It overcomes the limitations of traditional testing. Testers use their devices to identify errors and potential upgrades in a product during its development.

Crowdtesting can find the right people needed for product testing who are not in-house team members. This quickens the development process. It permits different views, skills, opinions, and ideas to be implemented in proferred solutions. 

Clients can request exploratory testing, functionality testing, usability, localization, and compatibility tests. During testing, the individuals monitor the tasks, identify the issues and report the errors in real-time. Videos and visuals are used to report the discovered bugs. 

Organizations can further connect with their customers directly or indirectly. Crowdtesting allows any interested person who meets the requirements to participate. This methodology saves resources such as money and time to concentrate on product quality improvement.

Who’s involved in crowdtesting? 

Individuals from different locations available all round the clock participate in crowdtesting. These are professionals, freelancers, experts, or specialists. Testers do not replace quality assurance teams, but their various opinions and skill sets are employed. 

Crowd testing agencies also exist. They are responsible for managing crowdtesters on behalf of the organization. They align professional testers to your product’s demographic data. The testing can be carried out by people under different conditions using various device configurations. 

Crowdtesters pass through an intense vetting process before selection since they mirror various end-users in their respective geographical location. Organizations retain them for successive tests and runs of the software development process. 

Crowdtesting has evolved over the years. Let’s have a look at its evolution.

The Continuous Evolution Of Crowdtesting 

Over time, crowdtesting has evolved alongside computing technologies. It has grown beyond desktop and web applications to mobile applications and the internet of things. Artificial intelligence, bots, and user-based technologies are being utilized to derive feedback from humans.

Manufacturers of traditional products such as refrigerators are now compelled to utilize digital skills to beat the competition. As more devices are being designed to use the internet, designers seek to provide a smooth digital experience for customers. 

Crowdtesting is advancing to incorporate improved technologies, enhancing user experience and beating the complexity of testing products. Currently, crowdtesting involves virtual and augmented reality in its implementation.

Why use crowdtesting?

Crowdtesting is essential for generating responses from various testers with different skills, devices, experiences, and perspectives. They provide broad human and hardware device coverage. Development teams can now test their products under real-world conditions. 

Organizations can put their customer experience first and lessen the possibility of negative customer experiences. Finished products, upgrades, and added features are then released with lesser bugs. This is possible after applying results derived from a crowdtest. 

Benefits of Crowdtesting

Here are the benefits you can maximize as a company from carrying out crowdtests. Complex products at different developmental stages are tested without burdening the quality assurance team. Carrying out a crowd test saves cost and effectively utilizes the human resources available. 

Testing all paths and inputs for developments with complex systems is impossible. This makes it difficult to discover hidden bugs and errors. In this case, crowdtesting is a preferred testing process. Here are the significant benefits of employing the crowdtesting methodology.

Speed

First, speed is required during testing for software development practices to achieve quicker results. Crowdtesting employs testers who are available at any time and also involves a large number of individuals. This hastens the testing and overcomes the limitation of waiting for in-house workers. 

Human Diversity

Crowdtesting allows users from different parts of the world speaking other languages to participate. This is suitable for testing multilingual applications. Testers can identify bugs applicable to specific languages and regions.  

Quality 

Users involved in crowdtesting are recruited from different places. These individuals will provide an unbiased opinion of the product being tested. Thus, the chances of communicating the problems are high. These errors may have been overlooked initially by the in-house team.

Resources

There are different configurations of devices available today. Testers can provide tested configurations specific for their mobiles, operating systems, browsers, etc. These limit developers from creating applications and websites that are easily configured across all devices.

Simplicity

Crowdtesting simplifies the testing burden for the quality assurance team, making the test procedures easily understandable. Human testers can overlook errors without altering the testing.

Parallel testing

Parallel testing is only possible with a crowdtesting strategy. Multiple testers can run different test scenarios of the same software on other devices. The results are thus generated faster.

Scalability

Crowdtesting eliminates the limitation of restricting direct testing on customers to big companies and corporations. Smaller companies and developers can test on a larger scale using crowdtesting, boosting their confidence when releasing their products globally.

Hardware diversity

Lastly, though suitable companies test various devices under real-world conditions, crowdtesting offers the hardware diversity needed at a lesser cost because users engage their own devices for testing. Developmental challenges like variations in operating systems, form factors, and other distinguishing characteristics involved in testing are not a hindrance. 

Is crowdsourced testing right for your organization? 

If your organization has a small quality assurance team, crowdsourced testing will enable you to involve a larger crew. It can be employed at different scales when the testing needs are irregular. These participants can provide user feedback from different perspectives. 

Your organization’s coverage is widened, and the scope of testing will increase with crowdsourced testing methods. Complex stages of development that burden the organization’s team are analyzed easily. 

Human resources gathered for crowdsourced testing can be used repetitively and effectively. This applies to companies working on test objects and industry-related programs. Analytical needs are met at any stage of the development cycle.

How to set-up crowdtesting 

Setting up a crowdtesting process begins with planning and ends with decision making. This can be done by organizations or employed crowdtesting agencies. Here are the steps you should follow to set up your crowdtesting process. 

● Planning
● Initiation
● Execution
● Evaluation and decisions

Planning

● First, specify the testing process characteristics applicable to an upgraded feature or a product’s beta version.
● Next, identify your intended goals and results to be achieved.
● Then, decide on the skills and technical knowledge your testers should have.
● State the timeframe allocated for the testing. Specify the time for implementing fixes as well.
● Subsequently, inform your testers about the required metrics to be sought for and the bug report structure to be developed.
● Finally, communicate the details to the coordinator of the testing process. Carry your development team along in the loop. Hire your crowdtesters via a specialist platform or by yourself.

Initiation

● After planning, design the different test scenarios and set up the various technical or functional configurations.
● Subsequently, grant your testers direct or indirect access to your app’s beta version. Provide security details to cloud platforms if used and all necessary applications needed.
● Lastly, simulate the test to illustrate the process and ensure it runs smoothly. You can generate initial sample results.

Execution

● Now that you have completed the initiation phase, state the methods of execution to the testers and commence the testing process.
● Then, patiently wait for the testers to complete the testing.

Evaluation and decisions

In conclusion, collate all the data and reports for review.

● Then, review all the collections and take the necessary actions. You can assess the performance of your testing team.
● Finally, you can repeat the testing cycle for complex structures where testers are employed again, and the hiring process is modified based on past test experience. 

Conclusion

Now you know the importance of crowd tests to software and hardware development. You can harness the diversity and effectiveness that crowdtesting offers to improve your user experience. Review our article to know who to employ to partake in crowdtesting.

FAQs 

What are crowdsourcing platforms? 

These platforms house communities that voluntarily address issues by providing ideas, responses, and suggestions to complex situations. These are tailored toward connecting people to contribute to developing new products and services. 

Is a survey equivalent to crowdsourcing? 

Crowdsourcing is tailored towards achieving specific organizational goals. Although surveys cover getting data from different sources, they cannot replace crowdsourcing, a quicker strategy. Customers can abandon surveys quickly due to the length of questions. 

What are the disadvantages of crowdsourcing? 

The entries might be poor in quality, and sometimes, confidentiality is not guaranteed. The popularity engagement can mislead companies during decision-making. The pool of individuals involved does not allow the hidden talents of specific individuals to be harnessed.