What Would You Miss In A Crowdsourced Testing Engagement?
In the era of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and IOT, there has been an increase in the focus toward customer-centricity. It is mandatory to produce an application that is customer-centric and can be accessed by users from different geographic locations with different levels of ‘tech-savviness’. Although software testing has become indispensable and enterprises have stopped overlooking this important process before launching their applications, there is still a need to test the applications at a deeper level. Often, after releasing the application to the market, issues related to user-experience arise due to unavailability of testers from different cultural backgrounds. For this reason, there’s been a huge shift toward crowdsourced testing.
What, Exactly, Is Crowdsourced Testing? Crowdsourced testing is a form of testing conducted by members of the global community, resulting in lower QA costs. Industries with users from different ages, professions, communities, and geographic locations are considering this solution to receive faster feedback. Crowd testing is not a replacement for traditional testing. However, it is an additional opportunity for enterprises to test their application in the real conditions without facing the hassles of investing in full-time QA resources. However, is it a foolproof plan to invest in a crowdsourcing engagement? Read Full Post Here‌
Is Crowdsourcing a Foolproof Engagement? Today’s end users expect only the best from the moment they download an application. Unsurprisingly, these increased expectations are placing a great deal of extra stress on the in-house QA and testing teams. QA teams face challenges of finding and fixing bugs on tighter deadlines, across various environments. Another challenge the testers face is to ensure the application runs seamlessly on different devices and OSs. Testing an application’s compatibility with various devices, browsers, and OSs is next to impossible because of the non-availability of an array of devices, and the high cost of setting up a lab and deploying costly human resources. However, hiring crowd testers from across the globe is not a foolproof solution as there are challenges involved.
Challenges Involved With Crowdsourced Testing: Before initiating the software testing process, enterprises must analyze the type of software testing that needs to be executed on the product. Additionally, the challenges involved in the process should be clear to the organization beforehand.
Here is a list of challenges involved with crowdsourced testing, which can help organizations in making a wise decision. 1. Security and Confidentiality Issues: Having the testing performed by a large group who might not have loyalty to that brand can impose huge risks on an organization. Application details exposing to strangers can also cause security damage to the brand. Without proper considerations to security aspects of data and functionality, there might be issues like data breach, cross-site scripting, and other security threats
2. Management Issues: It's challenging to manage testers across the globe and working with them in different time zones.
3. Communication Issues: There can be communication issues that may arise when an urgent response is needed from the resources working online.
4. Test Coverage Issues: As the payment depends on the number of bugs found, it's difficult to guarantee that important bugs are not ignored. It, therefore, requires more managerial oversight to ensure thorough bug identification.
5. Motivation Issues: Motivating testers to continue testing without getting distracted is a huge task as they are not in front of you and they can’t be accountable.
6. Quality Issues: The major issue that arises is ensuring the quality of testing or the quality of defects raised.
Is There a Way Out? Enterprises that are time-pressed and want complete coverage for their testing initiatives before they launch a product MUST consider outsourcing their testing initiatives to a specialist QA and software testing company. A specialist software testing vendor will have experience and will also have in-house testing teams to perform all types of testing for organizations. Also, the specialist testing vendors can find resources to perform extra tasks on need basis besides their in-house teams. This provides an extensive and in-depth testing process.
How Can TestingXperts Help? 1. Confidentiality of Project We take pride in the high standards we provide in maintaining confidentiality of the client’s IP and data. We follow complete access control and also sign NDA with clients before taking over projects.
2. Professional Expertise We have developed expertise over several years working with leading companies all over the world. All our resources are career testers with specific expertise on domains, industry tools and certifications as required.
3. Significantly Improved Product Quality We have structured test processes with standard artifacts like test templates, checklists, tools, etc. to ensure better product quality ensuring no production defects.
Conclusion In today's competitive world, demand for better application quality is rising as organizations deal with pressure to focus on customer satisfaction and to deliver good quality products promptly. Crowdsourced testing might appear to be an easy and cost-effective approach that involves skilled testers working from different geographies to cover all testing areas. However, to create a foolproof process, companies MUST choose specialist software testing and QA vendors for their testing initiatives.