Testing mobile software is now more demanding than before due to the complexity of the environment stemming from the variety of devices, operating systems and a wide range of networks. In addition to this, the intense competition over users’ attention has made first impressions vital for an application’s success. Applications are expected to work perfectly as soon as they are downloaded. Thus, in-house QA and engineering teams are under constant pressure to meet such heightened expectations. They are tasked with fixing more bugs within tighter deadlines. Also, there are thousands of unique devices and platforms that make it difficult and expensive for companies to achieve sufficient coverage with their internal sources alone. Organizations are on the lookout for quality assurance techniques to control the driving forces such as worldwide reach, rapid marketing and a feature-rich design, in determining a product’s success. For this reason, crowd testing, an effective software testing technique has gained immense popularity over the last decade.
What is Crowd Testing?
Crowd testing is a relatively new software testing innovation that enables the developers to have their software tested across multiple unique devices. It brings together thousands of professional testers from across the globe to test software on multiple devices, browsers and operating systems. This form of software testing meets the scale of necessary testing across a large user base spread throughout the world. The crowd’s diversity enhances test coverage which is not possible with a stand-alone QA team.
Popularity in Mobile Testing Industry
The mobile industry has grown leaps and bounds which in turn has encouraged the growth of a number of businesses sprung from it. Mobile software testing is one such significant discipline that has over the years gained prominence across the globe.
To ensure the highest level of performance of the software, developers have been trying out newer testing techniques in various devices to enhance their mobile coverage. However, due to its vast scope, it is difficult to test all of it in-house. This has given rise to newer testing practices and crowd testing being one of them. It includes bringing together the entire organization as a part of their crowd team or, in order to enhance the test coverage, include external crowd as well. Mobile computing industry’s immense growth has enhanced the value of crowd testing while giving an important avenue to show the value added by crowd testers.
Reasons for Leveraging the Power of Crowd Testing
The huge shift to crowd testing by mobile app testing industry in the last few years can be attributed to the following reasons:
- Provides easy access to mobiles and other devices other than the ones in their internal mobile testing labs without acquiring them
- Gives an insight into the viewpoint of people belonging to various demographic profiles that form the company’s user base
- Gives an opportunity to test with bandwidth, locales and other real world scenario conditions
- It is cost effective and brings in fast turn around
- It connects with end users who can sign up for the testing of the product before release.
Crowd testing has proved to be very effective in software testing for the mobile industry. It is however not limited to it. It can also be implemented in places where end user feedback is essential including performance test scenarios, usability tests, acceptance tests, etc.
Companies have realized that in order to develop apps that perform perfectly and meet user expectations while being functional and reliable from the time they are downloaded, it is important to include crowd testing into their testing methods. The significance of the mobile device as a vital platform to conduct tests has made crowd testing a formal practice in their mobile testing strategy.