Crowdsourcing and Outsourcing – The Best QA Practices

Crowdsourced testing and outsourcing of QA jobs have become crucial to ensure the delivery of glitch-free software applications for users.

These allow QA testing to be conducted by expert testers in real-world scenarios and give software developers sufficient room to innovate.

In an increasingly digitized world where product differentiation in the market is the recipe for success, bugs or glitches are the villains in the piece. The presence or absence of such bugs or their extent ultimately determines if the product is going to be accepted or rejected by the end-users.

Statistics reveal that it takes around 5.8 days for users to uninstall an application owing to reasons such as the presence of bugs, usability issues, and space constraints, among others.

So, where does that leave quality assurance in the fast-paced, iterative, and Agile-driven software development process?

Can it be left entirely to the script-driven test automation exercise? No matter how fast and reliably AI-driven test automation can detect glitches and help to release the software in the market, human monitoring cannot be ticked off the equation altogether. On the contrary, human input has become critical to ascertain whether the script-driven test automation is on the right course.

When it is about introducing manual intervention in the quality assurance process, the number of trained human resources present in the organization comes into play. Not every organization has the ‘spare’ human resources to conduct some critical testing like usability.

This is where crowdsourced testing and QA outsourcing come into the equation. Let us understand the two in the below-mentioned sections.

What is QA outsourcing?

In this model, a major portion of the quality assurance activities is given to a company that has the experience, wherewithal, and expertise to execute such activities against a fixed fee. The external company, on its part, plans and executes various types of testing on the software code developed by the parent company and detects glitches.

In other words, the outsourcing company offers its well-trained team of human resources on rent to a software development company.

There is usually a non-disclosure agreement signed between the two companies.

Benefits of QA Outsourcing:

The benefits of QA outsourcing are:

• The outsourcing QA team gets deeply involved in the project as its success in detecting bugs is likely to beget more projects for the company.
• The outsourced QA team make informed decisions on various aspects of testing rather than merely taking notes of the bugs – a feature of crowdtesting.
• The company outsourcing its software code and database to another company for testing doesn’t need to worry about data security.
• The company developing the software can easily communicate with the outsource testing team about any specific issue or bugs as everyone in the latter works together.
• The outsource QA team is committed to finding both big and small bugs as it is not paid for the number of bugs detected but for its time. So, the likelihood of finding major bugs is more.
• The outsourced QA team can understand the client’s requirements and work towards fulfilling the same.

What is crowdsourced testing?

Derived from the word ‘crowd’ and ‘outsourcing’, crowdsourced QA testing utilizes the services of the end-users in detecting glitches in software applications. It is about taking feedback from the end-users before a software product is released into the market.

Check this guide to learn more about Crowdsourced Testing.

It can be considered as one of the best ways to failproof a software application by testing it in real-world conditions.

Benefits of Crowdsourced Testing:

The inherent benefits of utilizing crowdsourced testing services are as follows:

• For any organization, it is not always possible to test a software application under all possible situations or scenarios notwithstanding the use of service virtualization and data masking. QA crowdsourced testing can enable the use of remote-based and distributed testers to test an application under various test scenarios and conditions.
• Crowdsourced testers can give their neutral views instead of being influenced by their organization’s biases. Further, since they are not a part of the development process they are not under pressure to toe the line of developers about specific criteria, features, or functionality of the application. This gives them the liberty to look at glitches from a fresh perspective.
• As the number of resources involved in crowdsourced software quality assurance is typically high, the testing process is fairly quick giving the software development teams a breather to focus on other ‘core’ activities.
• Crowdsourced testing can be more cost-effective as the organization outsourcing its testing job does not have to pay for the hours but for the number of bugs detected.

Conclusion

Although there may be issues of lack of confidentiality or non-detection of major flaws in a software application (testers are paid for the number of bugs detected not necessarily the type or level of bugs,) crowdtesting can accrue a slew of benefits. Be it crowdsourcing or outsourcing, the processes allow software developers the time to focus on their core activities and innovate. On the other hand, customers can get good quality software with minimal or no bugs.

Related posts:

• Best Crowdsourced Testing Companies
• Crowdsourced Testing Guide
• Cloud Testing Guide
• Beta Testing Guide
• User Acceptance Testing Guide