What Is Crowdtesting: All You Need to Know

OVERVIEW

Crowdtesting is an approach for launching quality software applications by conducting extensive QA or user experience testing. This method involves a large group of professional testers or beta testers from around the world who use their own devices to run tests in real-world conditions.

Every software has to outshine its competitors and make users' lives easier. Apart from delivering common expectations, does a product fulfill user requirements? Is there an area of friction that can be fixed? What new trends does the product need to adapt to? This is where crowdtesting comes into the picture.

What Is Crowdtesting?

When we talk about crowdtesting on a technical level, you are using a particular software platform for conducting remote testing on digital products. This testing is performed with the help of basic crowdsourcing principles, that is, sourcing groups of people to perform research, come up with new ideas for a product, complete various tasks, and so on.

These crowd testers are carefully selected to be eligible to test software solutions in different real-world conditions. The crowds of people it uses are nearly a perfect match for your selected demographic. That's how it's able to deliver quick as well as unbiased outcomes. This goes for each development stage, on your chosen devices, and from any location or time.

Why Use Crowdtesting?

Let’s start with analyzing a problem statement and how crowdtesting solves that problem.

Problem Statement:

Many mobile applications struggle with user retention because of usability issues, bugs, and a lack of compatibility across various devices and platforms. Identifying and resolving such problems efficiently ensures a positive user experience and maximizes app engagement and adoption.

Solution Using Crowdtesting:

Using crowdtesting, a comprehensive pool of testers with different operating systems, devices, and usage scenarios can successfully evaluate the app's performance and functionality. Developers can access various perspectives by outsourcing the testing process to a crowd of actual users. This helps uncover issues that may not have been obvious while testing in-house.

Overall, crowdtesting provides:

• High Flexibility and Cost-Effectiveness: Regardless of your digital solution, crowdtesting offers a wide range of proven-to-work and smart testing solutions covering user experience, usability, security, quality, customer journey, and bug testing.

The upside is that you don't have to bear ongoing costs for maintaining an in-house team. They also offer flexible price structures according to different requirements and budgets as they offer various service levels.

• High Level of Diversity: One striking benefit of using crowdtesting is to get the hang of the broadest range of opinions, attributes, and characteristics from people of different experience levels, places of birth, languages, cultures, backgrounds, and ages. This yields a wider variety of test scenarios and a higher test quality.
• Better Speed and Scalability: Crowdtesting has global or local resources on hand in case you quickly have to organize a running test due to changes in requirement or any other reason, for that matter.

Many testers can work on your project simultaneously, leading to quick test execution. Ultimately, this translates into a faster time-to-market and quicker development times without the need to build an in-house testing team from scratch.

• Actionable and Unbiased Outcomes: Even though it's controversial, first impressions are often last impressions. In other words, they make a huge difference. Since crowdtesting offers access to individuals and groups with a broad range of expectations and experiences, you get an insight into different perspectives.

Such people range from highly skilled testers to those with negligible knowledge of your product. The highly skilled ones would catch every little detail, whereas their newer counterparts wouldn't miss obvious problems.

Examples of Crowdtesting

Let's take a look at a few examples where crowdtesting is needed:

• Streaming Media: While every online industry has become highly competitive, the streaming media sector remains at the top. Media providers have to ensure seamless content delivery and offer their users a high-quality experience to attract and retain them.

Test automation is far from foolproof when testing streaming content. There are various industry-specific areas it doesn't cover which only crowdtesting can handle, such as feature usage, fast forward and rewind, pausing and playing, localization and personalization of content, cross-device and cross-platform continuity, live event monitoring, seamless navigation, accessibility, and ad operations.

• Retail: Retailers have been witnessing a full cart as far as never-ending customer demands continue to come up. Customers always want personalized and new experiences that keep the dopamine flowing. Crowdtesting helps in brand-level conformity, voice testing and validation, and end-to-end experience testing.

What Aspects Are Analyzed in Crowdtesting?

Here are some aspects that are analyzed during crowdtesting. Let's take a look:

• Identifying Browser or Device-Specific Issues: An enormous combination of browsers and devices is inevitable due to the large number of testers involved. The biggest advantage is that it makes it much easier to determine device browser-specific issues that can escape when you follow a conventional testing process.
• Identifying Usability Issues: Usability testers emphasize areas of an application that are technically working correctly as far as the functionality is concerned. But at the same time, they aren't much of a use from the user's point of view. Crowdtesting involves multiple live users testing a software product, which helps uncover these subtle usability issues without any issues.
• Performing Load Testing of Application Servers: Since various testers dabble into the application simultaneously, whether intentionally or unintentionally, crowdtesting can be extremely useful when determining application behavior when multiple users are logged in simultaneously.
• Testing With Limited Combinations: In some instances, apps need a specific combination to test on devices, and it's difficult or costly to find that combination. However, crowdtesting helps address this rare condition and makes it easily manageable without much effort.

The above tutorial demonstrates how to test websites in different browsers on cloud testing platforms like LambdaTest. This will help ensure software applications are free from compatibility and usability issues. Subscribe to the LambdaTest YouTube Channel for more such videos.

How to Perform Crowdtesting?

Crowdtesting has to be the front and center of your development strategy. Now, coming to the ‘how’ part, it takes a series of methodic steps to perform successful crowdtesting. Let's take a detailed look.

Phase I – Planning and Preparation

It's vital to have clarity In the kind of instructions, requirements, and goals that are in the picture. Your planning should include describing test environments followed by solid preparation by giving access to crucial parameters and settings. Developing unique specifications during the kickoff call for enhanced clarity is also important.

Phase II – Initiation and Configuration

It's crucial to set up different testing scenarios during the initiation and configuration stages. You also need to set up specific technical or functional configurations. As soon as everything is clear, you'll have the right testers fitting your custom requirements.

Phase III – Test Execution

Now it's finally time! Those skilled crowdtesting professionals will get to work and start testing your software product. A project manager supervises and guides testers, facilitates meeting deadlines, tracks what the QA professionals do, and gets feedback while testing.

As long as the crowdtesting organization facilitates proper management and collaboration, it will end up significantly reducing your management overhead. Figuring out flaws in your testing process won't be a pain since you'll have a single point of contact.

Phase IV – Test Results

Once the developers fix all the bugs detected, it's important to retest the product to ensure every aspect works correctly. There are always some fixes that might cause a negative impact on how other functions of a product perform. A handful of features might still fail to live up to the expected performance. Thus, it's crucial to conduct advanced testing even if the team successfully fixes bugs.

Crowdtesting Tools

Crowdtesting requires extensive integration with test management and test reporting. That's how it makes it convenient for you to manage test execution reports. Since multiple testers are involved globally, they should ideally use highly trusted and credible tools.

Let's look at some popular crowdtesting tools that have served well in the past and continue to do so.

• LambdaTest: LambdaTest is an AI-powered test execution platform that enables you to perform manual and automated tests at scale across more than 3000 real desktop and mobile environments. With LambdaTest, you can run tests on a real device cloud to test your software applications under real-user conditions.
• Applause: Applause is one of the pioneers in the crowdtesting industry, providing a wide range of testing services, including functional, usability, localization, and security testing.
• Test IO: Test IO offers on-demand crowdtesting services focusing on quick turnaround times and extensive test coverage.
• Crowdtest: Crowdtest provides crowdtesting services to improve the quality and performance of software products through comprehensive testing.

How to Choose the Right Crowdtesting Tool?

Now that you're done with your research and have crunched your numbers, there's a great chance that it might look like crowdtesting can be your next destination.

But before choosing a crowdtesting tool or platform, there are always some factors you must consider. Speaking of which, here is what you should look for while selecting a crowdtesting service. Let's take a look.

• Project Managers: Pricing: Is the tool you're trying to opt for clear on price changes if you add new requirements while running tests? Most trustworthy crowdtesting platforms offer a free trial version—no strings attached. You are often good to go as long as the platform is transparent on how it adapts to increasing efforts and complexities in a project. Another characteristic of a good platform is that it offers options or packages that meet your requirements.
• Testing Process: As long as you understand that process and see its relevance to your organizational goals, it’s a win-win situation. Does it have a variety of service levels? Can they manage the testing process from the beginning to the end? Most importantly, bug reports must be detailed, clear, and actionable.
• Expertise: The platform you're about to use must have relevant and proven experience to test the kind of solution you develop and the industry you work in. Your crowd testers must incorporate in-depth knowledge of the type of tests you require along with technologies involved.
• Reliability: Besides stability, which is obvious, your crowd testers should also have plenty of experience dealing with various organization types and conducting testing at multiple levels. They can range from mobile applications on websites to some flawless enterprise-level applications. You should also be able to rely on your crowd testers for rapid, on-time, and comprehensive testing that meets your expectations every single time.
• Flexibility: With continuous changes and evolutions in customer demands, your tests might need plenty of changes in real-time. You might need more testers and a whole new level of experience to check new features, functionalities, versions, models, locations, devices, etc. Testers must have the hands-on expertise and flexibility to modify their testing process as per requirements.
• Solution-Focused: There come times when some gaps and bottlenecks look nearly impossible to tackle. But even the most complex issues become bearable if your crowd testers can find promising solutions quickly, leading to positive outcomes. A reliable and experienced partner can help your time to market while giving their best.
• Quality and Security: If you want to determine whether your crowdtesting partner can offer the level of security and quality your software product demands, proven results and testimonials will help you get the assurance you need.

Comprehensive case studies and a background of high-level customer help. If they have proven data safety and product security in the past, it will help you. You’ll also be assured that your results will be confidential and your product and data will be safe and secure.

• Crowdtesters: Some level of trustworthiness is necessary with the crowdtesters responsible for handling your software products. Ensure you know how they're chosen and whether there's a setup for ongoing evaluation. It's even better to rank them for performance, capabilities, and experience. Knowing how active they are also helps you determine how much to include them in the process.

Limitations of Crowdtesting

Just like every other testing method, crowdtesting does have some limitations. Let's take a look.

• High Error Rates: Crowdtesters lack a certain level of familiarity with the software product, which might get them to miss some crucial bugs. Since we're also changing testing professionals over different cycles, different individuals might repeat the same mistakes.

Depending on your approach, an organization might encounter high error rates while crowdtesting instead of having a dedicated testing team. Lack of familiarity can equate to a reduced likelihood of finding bugs.

Also, it's possible to reduce the risk of new participants repeating the same mistakes with the help of timely reporting of false positives and making them aware of the problems your previous crowd testers encountered.

• Lack of Commitment: When there is a lack of motivation, commitment often goes out the window. Some participants might start committing initially, but interest levels can be in vain as other tasks on their priority list take over. Organizations can come up with incentivization to keep the morale of these crowd testers high and retain a certain level of loyalty.
• Confidentiality Risks: Since keeping tabs on every crowd tester is nearly impossible, confidentiality is always a concern. So, ensure you do a thorough background search and opt for a trusted group or an organization while keeping super-sensitive features limited to in-house teams. This mainly works for security-sensitive features and functionalities.

Best Practices for Crowdtesting

If you want to make the most out of crowdtesting, it's vital to keep the following parameters in mind. Let's take a detailed look.

• Clarify Objectives: Always know exactly why you need to start with crowdsourced testing and the outcomes you would like to achieve. What is your definition of a successful process?

Once you have precise answers to such questions, it will help the crowdtesting experts develop the most appropriate solution that fulfills all your requirements. Moreover, you'll save costs, eliminate confusion, and avoid unnecessary actions that take time and effort.

• Specify Target Audiences: What is your primary user base for your software product? What countries is your target audience based in? Also, note whether there are unique demographics and the standard device types your user base commonly indulges in.

This type of segmenting and identifying prospective users will help you decide on the kind of testers who can exercise the highest accuracy while acting like actual customers representing your target audience.

• Develop Advanced Descriptions: What does your test plan look like? Do you prefer exploratory testing? What outcomes are you looking for when you opt for a crowdtesting team?

This can include but is not limited to, indices, bugs, numbers, and so on. You must never overlook setting deadlines, describing environments, and having a clear picture of specifications, which can be helpful for the process flow of your crowdtesting.

• Pinpoint Bottlenecks: Take a good look at your previous test execution processes and note the problems you've already faced. Once you do that, describe them to your crowd testers along with some known issues that already have your awareness.

This way, your crowd testers can identify potential weaknesses in your software product and report any known issues. It's a simple tip to help you confirm that such issues don't occur when your users get their hands on your product.

• Have a Project Coordinator: A dedicated project manager or coordinator will enable you to be in the loop regarding the entire crowdtesting cycle. But even if you don't have a specific individual for this particular role, a good crowdtesting platform will handle your collaborations. Just make sure that you opt for a tool that integrates well with other project management tools.
• Self-Explanatory Questions: Avoid question-flooding in your email; you should have some self-explanatory FAQs.

Crowdtesting vs Other Testing Methods

Every successful testing cycle leverages a combination of different testing methodologies. Speaking of which, there are a few most popular testing methods testers use in combination with crowdtesting.

Let's look at a comparison and how using these alongside crowdtesting can offer some substantial benefits.

• UX Agencies and Digital Experience Analytics Platforms: UX agencies offer the testing support level on a larger scale. However, they also have specialized or focused knowledge around user research and usability, especially if you are considering the design of digital solutions.

LDigital experience platforms emphasize accomplishing that goal with the help of a wide variety of tools capable of monitoring what users interact with or look at. Another example is software solutions that track mouse click locations.

It's true that crowdtesting can offer a lot of quantitative data, but it's important to keep in mind that it also provides qualitative feedback. It's possible to employ other kinds of tests, including accessibility testing, usability tests, user interviews, and direct feedback from actual users.

• Beta Testing: One of the similarities between crowdtesting and beta testing is that they both directly put products in testers’ hands. They can also be a part of your target market or your customers. It's to check how a product fares in actual real-world situations. Both methods help developers check how their product discovers actionable insights from a bigger group.

Typically, beta testing runs for about two weeks or so and emphasizes a greater focus on customer experience when it comes to the product. On the other hand, crowdtesting emphasizes a particular area, like checking for bugs. The testing time is much shorter, ranging from a couple of hours to a few days. This, in turn, offers results that are a lot quicker.

• In-House Testing: One of the oldest and the most traditional testing methods includes conducting tests in-house within an organization. However, setting up an in-house team can take time and effort.

With crowdtesting, you can quickly bring more testers on board virtually, regardless of the location and time. You'll also have a fresh pair of eyes for your product with zero bias.

• Traditional Market Research: It accumulates data via focus groups, surveys, and interviews. However, research doesn't always end up being iterative. When you find people and set up locations, it can incur significant costs and demand considerable time commitments. In a way, it's a useful yet rigid testing method that doesn't easily accommodate other changes.

However, crowdtesting through online platforms eliminates this burden to a great extent. It also adds to conventional research methods by offering testing to become more flexible and operate in real-world conditions, taking far less time.

• Automation Testing: While automated tests call for vigilant planning, there's only so much they can cover due to their high focus on checking code changes and then rechecking them. However, the most striking benefit is that such tasks are conducted relentlessly and entirely without human errors.

However, it does lack a certain level of human element. And to be fair, it's not only about making errors. That's where crowdtesting comes into the picture as a partner for test automation. Specifically, it includes real users and customers in the development phase of a product and provides them a chance to put their needs forward.

Automation testing can further be leveraged using cloud-based platforms like LambdaTest, which lets users perform manual and automation testing across different desktop and mobile web browsers online.

Note : Test Your Web and Mobile Apps on Real Devices. Try LambdaTest Now!

Crowdsourcing vs. QA Outsourced Testing

The basic method for documenting functional requirements involves the following:

A group of people contributes to the collective effort despite working from different locations. Since the process is online, there are fewer restrictions. Testers who are a part of crowdsourcing get paid after the completion of their work or when they validate the bug found.

One of the most popular examples of crowdsourcing is Wikipedia, which stems from the outcome of the information that various writers and editors have come up with. Isn't that what makes it one of the most comprehensive encyclopedias out there?

On the other hand, QA outsourcing is a result of the combined effort of testers who are present in the same workplace. Unlike crowdtesting scenarios, testers get paid regardless of the output generated, and several bugs discovered are validated when they work under similar conditions.

Confidentiality and Security

When developing a new application, concealing some code details from competitors is crucial. That makes confidentiality obligations a necessary point of testing and quality assurance with both crowdsourcing and outsourcing. Usually, there are non-disclosure agreements in place that restrict information access and maintain confidentiality to keep outsiders at bay.

However, the lack of extreme confidentiality can be considered a disadvantage of crowdsourcing since it involves many anonymous individuals. Even though testers might sign an NDA, they will still have access to every chunk of relevant project information, like a registered community member.

Since these testers expand globally, honoring the terms of an NDA and exercising supervision can become challenging. After all, there's no guarantee that hackers won't make their way through embedding malicious code in your software product. Worse, registered members can also have some direct competitors, which essentially nullifies the nevertheless, the monitoring has to be strict and continuous to minimize the possibility of breaches.

Management

It's proven that high-quality products result from competency in management and instructions and leveraging the power of analysis and set standards. It's no secret that maintaining coordination of work among testers and quality assurance engineers, managing test runs, and tracking test results call for specific knowledge and skills.

Quality assurance outsourcing encompasses taking care of resource management, starting from choosing the most suitable candidate for the role of a project manager capable of devoting their best efforts to get a complete grasp on your business and goals and being on high alert for potentially expensive mistakes.

However, with crowdsourcing, the requirement for management oversight is ever increasing. Instead of worrying about being more productive, you also have the crucial responsibility of managing diverse testers on a large scale. Not only that, but the results will also vary significantly from tester to tester.

Regarding time zone-related obstacles, working with a team is much easier despite a massive time zone difference. The same is not the case with having a vast pool of testers from across the globe.

Approach

One of the primary targets of testing and quality assurance is to discover exactly what customers want from a particular software product and its requirements and then test this product according to these set requirements. There are some questions every organization needs to ask themselves before releasing a product.

For instance, what is the customer's priority? What is the burning problem customers wish to solve with your product?

Here is how outsourcing makes a significant contribution.

• An in-depth involvement of the testing team and a personalized approach towards the project.
• Testing in the QA team goes far beyond simple bug notes by making crucial informed decisions.
• They are perfectly capable of determining every aspect of the client's requirements.
• While crowdsourced testers have their benefits, sometimes they need more monitoring to motivate them to pay close attention to your software project.

Experience and Qualification

QA and software testing call for applying specific crucial skills and act as practice areas. Under any circumstances, any tasks related to these shouldn't be handed to unskilled workers or inexperienced rookies.

Generally, a QA team has in-depth knowledge of various software development phases and contains experts who can implement such knowledge. Whenever you're outsourcing, it's an unspoken rule that you manage to obtain highly qualified test engineers with appropriate college degrees or specialties.

For instance, they can easily replicate complex and critical bugs, which indicates that QA engineers have a deeper understanding of how a defect might occur, the circumstances leading to it, and the steps they can take to find it.

On the other hand, a crowd tester gets paid for each bug defined, regardless of how complex or critical it is. In some cases, they might lack the motivation to look closely.

Costs

Depending on a wide variety of factors, the cost of crowdsourcing and outsourcing QA services can vary. Some factors include the service provider, location, project complexity, and expertise level required.

When you outsource QA services, the cost usually depends on the vendor's project-based fee or their hourly rate. The hourly rate usually depends on the location and expertise of the vendor. As far as we are discussing project-based fees, the cost depends on project scope, number of testers, and project duration.

When you crowdsource QA services, it can turn out to be a lot less expensive as compared to outsourcing. The reason is you have access to a Large pool of testers across the globe willing to work at competitive rates. Of course, crowdsourcing costs also depend on project duration, complexity, and number of testers needed. Total costs can vary from a couple of hundred dollars to a few thousands depending on the scope and size of a project. It's a striking contrast to outsourcing.

Due to the similarities between crowdtesting and outsourcing, one might feel that they are more or less the same. So, is crowdtesting just outsourcing? Well, yes and no. Crowdtesting is another term for crowdsourced testing, which is also a kind of outsourced testing, but there are some key differences.

Let's draw a quick comparison between the two:

Conclusion

Crowdtesting is one of the fastest, most cost-effective, and most reliable methods to test the quality of a product and make it free of bugs. It's a unique methodology to leverage the expertise of consultants, professionals, and some skilled users to test different applications under precise real-world environments.

Testing an application or any digital product from the end user's perspective is a surefire way to build successful digital products. And with an actual crowd under various real-world scenarios is the best way to go at it!