#crowdsourcedtesting

Crowd testing for E-Commerce Industry | Crowdsourced Mobile App Testing

Most of vendors provide crowd sourced testing (also called “crowd testing”) services and also the platform for managing testers, who are working as a crowd on the testing projects. As per the software life- cycle, most clients would specify the type of tests and what kind of devices that is need to be used for software testing and the configurations required for testing.

Quizzing techniques can be used when we want to control the testing and have the crowd testers perform as we want them to. In this technique, testers will be given questions by framing the test cases as questions, such as what the output is when a particular action is performed, and what is present in a particular screen. Multiple choice answers are given with one option having the expected result.

This process will certainly help to address some the following challenges:

• No control process and adequate information on what is exactly being tested by the crowd

• Driving the crowd testing experts and making them test further decisive tests or scenario based test instead of meeting acceptance criteria only.

Crowd testing cycle or process comprises following phases:

1. Preparation Phase: In this phase, a tester will access client's business needs and goals. He will design test plan and will fix the testing price as well as deliverable.

2.  Initiation Phase: In this phase a tester will define test cases and configurations. For this he will recruit crowd testers from a global pool of experts. Taking responsibility to prepare and setup secure and better environment for testing.

3. Execution phase: This is the most important phase. Here, test execution will take place.

4. Evaluation Phase: This phase is for validating results and conducting quality assurance. Preparation of deliverable and process the compensation of testers also takes place within it.

5. Completion Phase: At last, a good presentation to the client whatever testing results that one may have.  Refining crowd testing expert’s ratings and close the test cycle.

6. Publishing of App over free portals: Application is published over free portal or free lancing websites so that Crowd testing could be done.

7. Advisements for Testing Hunt: An adv made over portal that if someone reports any bug would get a reward price depending upon the severity and priority of bug reported. No reward price for known issues and the one who reports issue first will get reward.

8. Tester or user Feedback: Through 'Feedback' or 'Report a bug' option over application, tester/user can report their issues or bug.

9. Quiz for Crowd: A set of question or scenario based test cases asked by dev/testers so that they may know that the tester/user is familiar with the functionality of application.

10. Bugs Review: Bugs are reproduced by dev/offshore testing team and if not reproducible appropriate reply to the user that "Need more info (OS version, browser, login credentials, time zone)" so that bug could be reproduced.

11. Valid bugs: Client will decide the priority and severity of the bugs depending upon the business impact and impact over the application.

12. Reward Price: Appropriate rewards would be given to the user/tester who have found the bugs voluntarily as promised by the Client.

13. Bug Resolution: Bugs would be resolved by the dev team and make sure that it would not be reproduced again and regression of the bugs should not impact any other functionality of app.

14. Set of Users/testers: Filter out the set of testers from crowd who logged best bugs and we can rely over their testing.

15. Assign Tasks to Testers/users: For making assured that app is working cross platform (OS) and support multiple browsers, we can assign tasks to set of testers.

16. Release of Application: Application is released into the market.

Crowd sourced testing is providing the application’s testing to a community of testers through online platform:-

It is really effective in some of perspectives and well serve below test objectives:

As we know every user have a different way of using the application, so providing the application to crowd for testing would enhance the bug findings, resulting in better exploratory testing.

While testing the application every tester use different configuration systems or devices or browsers which enhance the compatibility factor of the application.

The load that generates when N number of testers are testing the application could be very much useful to analyze application’s load and stress handling capabilities. It provides a kind of informal performance test to the application.

Most of projects are now handled via Agile Methodology in which we have frequent releases, so time is a really important factor in it. Crowd of testers would be available every time and can provide test results in a very short duration.

Real user base scenarios that are not hypothetical test cases  are served by a crowd

Some of the important things which are impossible to replicate by a single product based company are  achieved by crowd.  For example, depth in use cases, variety in tools,  multiple browsers , platforms, etc. 

Since variety of testers  are engaged in crowd, comprehensive testing is undertaken especially in localized based applications

Most of the critical paths of a software are tested during design phase which results in reduction in maintenance cost

Challenges  often arises from the unpredictable  nature of customer demands.

It is fairly lower price as compared to traditional testing practices as hiring a dedicated professional is expensive. It provides value for money

It helps in marketing of the tool/application as crowed testing of product makes it famous among testers