Crowdsourced testing is an emerging trend, that utilises that crowdsourcing’s efficiency and diversity for software testing. The term crowdsourcing (crowd testing) was devised by Jeff Howe in 2006, in his article for Wired magazine called Rise of Crowdsourcing. It allows companies to test software, websites, and applications via a large network of software testing experts and individuals.
Overview of Crowdsourced Testing:
Crowdsource testing is best for things like beta and compatibility testing, which are necessary final steps for testing. It is very popular in many companies. In 2018, The Microsoft Bounty Program awarded over $2,000,000 to encourage and reward external security research in key technologies to protect our customers. Crowdsourced testing is one of the fastest and effective way to test your software applications.
The global crowdsourced testing market size is expected to grow from USD 1.3 billion in 2019 to USD 2.0 billion by 2024, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 9.9% during the forecast period. Post 2020 pandemic era, most of the organizations software QA teams were rendered ineffective due to inefficient remote working infrastructure and capabilities. This is when independent software testing and crowdsourced testing came to rescue.
Benefits of Crowdsourced Testing :
Crowdsourced testing is highly valuable as it offers many benefits:
- Cost Effective : As in Crowdsourced testing, tester is paid only for valid bugs, it is cost effective. Since the tester is testing the apps in their own environment and on their own devices, there is no additional cost of setting up the infrastructure. In an interview the ex-director of Google, James Whittaker explained that crowd testing enabled them to save around 10%-25% of their testing budget, while delivering great results.
- Quality of Software : Crowdsourced testing can help you improve your quality of software apps by ensuring to find all the critical bugs before your product reaches the customers. Generally, it is recommended to allocated 20-30% of your testing budget for crowdsourced testing.
- Test Coverage : It offers global coverage along with testing on various devices, browsers and from testing experts. With this information the development team can get a real-world insight about their app’s performance.
- Flexibility : It offers a lot of flexibility to organizations. They can test projects by changing resources, location, time of testing and make payments accordingly. It provides option to leverage different testers, infrastructure as and when required.
- Experienced Crowd Testers : These testers vary from people with years of experience to newbies or students. Software testing requires people with all sorts of experience, as it offers different point views while testing a software.
- Reduces Time to Market : It works well with improving efficiency of the development teams by reducing the time to market. As the crowd testers are available across geographies and time zones, it helps in receiving faster testing insights.
The huge benefits of crowd testing has made it favourite form of testing for many organizations like Apple, Google, Microsoft, and many IT companies. Companies can ensure safe access to their applications and information by relying on trustworthy crowd sourcing platforms. Most of the crowd sourcing platforms ensure to verify and register testers under them, while providing them secure/restricted access to testing apps.
Pro – Test partners with a leading crowdsourced solutions provider to help our clients get the best crowdsourced test solutions. Interested in crowdsourced testing your app? Connect with us to explore reliable and professional crowd testing solutions.
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