Crowdsourced Testing: A New Way to Do Mobile App Testing

With smartphone market penetration reaching nearly 80% in the U.S. in 2016, providing users with high-quality mobile experiences is critical to the success of many businesses. Mobile testing strategies need to be robust enough to provide coverage of the hundreds of devices that consumers and enterprise customers use, while remaining fast and flexible enough to keep up with the rapid pace of development.

The Challenges of Mobile App Testing

Many organizations find that in order to achieve the comprehensive testing coverage they need to release high-quality products, they must either risk missing deadlines or invest in a large QA team to keep up with the pace of development. Unfortunately, the cost of traditional testing strategies can be prohibitive, and as much as 20-25% of application development budgets can end up being devoted to testing costs.

“The two biggest challenges remaining when it comes to testing mobile and multichannel solutions are: the lack of an in-house test environment (for 38% of respondents) and the lack of sufficient time to test (36%).

World Quality Report 2015-2016

In order to achieve the testing coverage they need that is both affordable and fast enough to leverage without slowing down deployment, teams need to turn to innovative QA methodologies such as crowdsourced testing.

Crowdsourced Testing for Scalable Mobile QA

Crowdsourced testing provides a flexible, scalable alternative to traditional QA. By providing teams with a large, on-demand testing workforce, crowdsourcing represents a new way to do QA that works well with the fast pace of Agile and CI/CD development cycles.

The potential for increasing testing bandwidth and offloading mobile device management make crowdsourced testing a prime solution for mobile testing. Crowdsourcing allows for applications to be tested across a wide range of devices and operating systems, ensuring comprehensive test coverage and a better user experience.

Developing a Strategic Approach to Faster QA

Leveraging crowdsourced testing allows teams to break away from their dependence on manual testing without sacrificing test quality or coverage. By integrating crowdsourced testing into their testing workflows, QA teams can develop more efficient testing strategies.

Crowdsourced testing platforms like Rainforest QA give teams the benefit of increasing their tester workforce without scaling out their in-house team or managing an outsourced QA service. As a result, teams can offload repetitive functional and regression testing to crowdsourced testers and spend more time focused on UX testing, exploratory testing, and managing testing automation tools.

“One reason for the high spend on QA and Testing is a continued use of costly manual testing in the process, despite a significant increase in the proportion of testing budget consumed by automated testing (45%) this year. The 2015 survey data reveals that 39% of respondents feel a reliance on manual testing is the number one technological challenge in application development today.“

World Quality Report 2015-2016