Crowdtesting is fast, affordable, localised, and has better relevance to your potential audience
Crowdsourced testing or crowd testing is an emerging trend in software testing which exploits the benefits, effectiveness, and efficiency of crowdsourcing and the cloud platform.
It differs from traditional testing methods in that the testing is carried out by many different testers from different places, and not by hired consultants and professionals. The software is put to the test under diverse, realistic platforms which makes it more reliable, cost-effective, fast, and bug-free.
Besides, crowdsourced testing allows for remote usability testing because specific target groups can be recruited through the crowd.
In simpler terms, crowd testing is basically a software testing process that is done by the crowd in a real-world setting, e.g., real devices, real people, real networks, etc.
Whether it’s crowd testing, outsource testing or even in-house testing, app testing is crucial for your business. Without proper testing being done to your app or system, it can lead to serious damage to your business.
Imagine a few scenarios:
Scenario 1:
It’s the end of the year.
You will be having Christmas sales or year-end sale.
Thousands of users log in to your site, but unfortunately, your site is down because of heavy load, or maybe there’s an issue in querying the database. Where will your users go? To your competitors of course!
A user with an item in the cart, but while checking out, there’s an issue, the cart is empty. The user tries to add the items again to the cart.
Unfortunately, it goes out of stock due to a lot of other users trying to buy the same item. Your user will leave a bad review and ratings on your app; this will impact your prospective users and eventually, they will move on to the next best option.
A customer checks out and makes the payment. While trying to make the payment, a bug in your system takes action, the credit card is already charged, but the order status is not updated yet and you did not receive the payment.
Of course, the bank might return the money, but your customers are not going to trust your app anymore. Again, they will leave bad reviews and bad ratings, and it might scare prospective users since it involves money.
The worst being social media posts, especially if it goes viral! That would be your worst nightmare.
Scenario 2:
A guy who is looking for fitness apps goes to the app store to start looking for gym apps. Since there are a dozen gym apps in the app store, what he did was he decided to check the ratings!
Based on the ratings, he downloads the app.
Imagine that one of those apps has a bad review like the ones below, imagine it’s your app: Do you think he would download your app?
Also read: In the era of gig and sharing economies, software development stands to gain from crowdsourced testing.
We believe you get the idea now on the importance of testing your app thoroughly. So far, you have made up your mind that you need to check your app, the question now is, to crowd test your app or to outsource your app testing altogether.
How crowdtesting can help improve your sales and business:
1. Real-world settings. Crowdtesting is done by real users with real devices and in a real location. By crowdtesting your app, you are going through a series of tests by actual users that might eventually be your customers. You are putting your app in its real lifecycle environment. By giving the crowd to test your app, validate and verify, you will get rea; feedback from the perspective of the users.
2. Localisation. Eventually, you will want to expand your business to a new market. E.g. currently, you are only focusing on the Malaysia market, but you want to expand your market to Vietnam. Yes, you can use an emulator or a simulator, but it will not cover all the aspects. For example, there are differences in network connection speeds.
Not only that, language and character are different. You might have no idea how the user behaviour will be. To set up an in-house testing team and you might need them for a short period will cost you a lot. Hence, crowd testing will be the best solution for you and your business!
3. Devices. To cover all the devices fragmentation and OS version will be quite impossible. By using crowd testing to test your app, you will get the idea on what devices and OS you should check based on the information that you get from that specific location. You can prioritise which devices and OSes you should give more focus to and which one are lower priorities.
4. Network coverage. As mentioned above, you can use an emulator/simulator to test your app, but you can’t get the precise results due to various context of usage in the network. The bandwidth, the speed will be different based on location. With crowd testing, you can tackle these issues since testing is done by real users, real devices in a real situation with a real network provider.
5. Affordable. Crowdtesting is affordable and fast. You will have a large pool of testers with a different type of expertise based on your needs for you to choose. You will reduce a lot of cost on hiring the right knowledge to test your app.
6. Fast. Crowdtesting runs in a short-cycle. You will get your result in 24-48 hours. You can start your testing immediately without the hassle of the hiring process and finding the right candidate that might take up to 6 months for you to find the right person.
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