Crowd Testing – Types of Testing & Domains
Types of Testing Leveraging Crowd
1. Beta & Compatibility testing
Crowd-source testing is best for things like beta and compatibility testing, which are necessary final steps for testing; however, most software is far too complex for late-stage testing like this to cover all of the possible issues. A dedicated outsourced or in-house testing team will give a better idea of the software’s possible defects, but will not give anywhere near the scope of crowd-testing.
Adoption of trends like cloud computing & bring your own device (BYOD) have resulted in the need for software to be compatible across configurations. In-house testing would fail in such a case where critical elements may be overseen due to lack of resources & time
2. Usability
Often testing is automated in agile environments and crowd testing can’t be used for testing. However, one area that can’t be automated is “usability”. Importance of real-world testing the product for real-world use can’t be under-estimated. Crowdsourcing is really ideal when you’re shooting for the mass market and you’re looking to get concrete data on how people use your product, how they navigate the interface, or how they engage with specific features. It can deliver bite-sized chunks of actionable feedback without costing you too much.
Domain Areas for Crowd Testing – Examples
1. Technology Applications
Search relevance – Google needed to measure the effectiveness of modifications to its search algorithms. By using the crowd, it was able to tap into the power of a skilled, secure, global workforce to verify and validate the relevance of search data in local markets.
User-generated content translation – Companies have been able to reuse the product and services reviews provided by consumers in an effective and cost efficient manner. A number of organizations are utilizing the native language capability of global crowds to translate this content, which is often in small containable snippets of text. The reviews are routed to crowd workers with the ability to translate the original user-generated content into the target languages.
In-country testing Testing – It is focused on delivering testing services to customers who have a physical location requirement or require local credentials to fully test their products or services.
2. Banking, Financial Services and Insurance
Crowdsourcing in the financial services industry provides the following –
* Regulatory compliance monitoring
* Mortgage processing and loan data clean-up
* Invoice Processing
* Data entry
3. Retail
* Market research
* Improving social media communications with sentiment analysis
* Content production
* Loyalty program application processing
* Content verification
4. Travel and Hospitality
* User-generated content translation
* Improving hotel reviews
* Creating visual reviews
* Multilingual keyword strategies for SEO
5. Healthcare/Life Sciences
* Medical forms processing
* Content production
* Product development
* Data mining
* Directory building
Source : “Software Testing – Effective Methods, Tools and Techniques“ book authored by our director, Mr Pradeep Oak and published by McGraw Hill.