CROWDTESTING? THE QA WIN-WIN
Crowdtesting as the new overwhelming trend in the testing world offers numerous advantages. In addition to helping professional relationships evolve, it offers numerous advantages: a win-win system for users and testers.
A CROWD THAT REVOLUTIONIZES WORK PRACTICES
Companies must change, adapt to new consumption patterns, make their know-how and disciplines digital, and integrate them in every dimension of their structure.
This also means working with the famous Generations Y and Z, the digital natives. Generations for which freelance work becomes the norm. To the point where freelancing is growing faster than salaried work in some sectors. In the United States, the number of self-employed individuals increased 85% in 10 years. In France, the word "uberization" which broadly represents the freelance principle was noted as one of the 12 most frequently quoted words in 2015.
But above all, the word "uberization" refers to the notion of crowd. Numerous start-ups created their model relying on the crowd, such as Uber, which gave this elemental movement its name. It is about relying on the abilities of a community of people to offer a service. Crowdfunding is the best known and one of the oldest crowd concepts: it allows to call on the crowd to finance a project in a participatory manner.
Crowdtesting is the uberization of Test QA: it helps enter into a contract with a global crowd of testers to have a digital product tested.
A WIN-WIN SITUATION FOR BOTH USER AND TESTER
In addition to changing professional relationships, it offers numerous advantages, such as meeting the needs for tests which might be difficult to perform in a "classic" laboratory testing campaign. Thus, crowdtesting is the new heavy trend in testing.
Flexibility
In a world where everything moves at an ever increasing speed and needs change continuously, adaptation is critical. Also, calling on crowdtesting to implement a test campaign offers advantages from the flexibility standpoint: no planning challenges, a crowd of professional testers available 24/7 to take care of the tests.
Language risks and Cultural peculiarities
Crowdtesting is recommended for international products available in multiple languages. Since crowdtesting has no borders, freelance testers are better able to meet the expectations of users in target countries and satisfy the specific requirements of national regulations (General Terms of sales, payment, etc.). They are better able to identify language bugs and special characters and are familiar with the web trends in their countries.
Geolocation
Localization tests are fairly difficult to perform because they require travel. Given that there are crowdtesters throughout the four corners of the world, geolocation testing also becomes a lot simpler!
CROWDTESTING BY STARDUST AND ITS "WE ARE TESTERS" COMMUNITY
StarDust has created the WE ARE TESTERS community of professional testers. Located mostly in Europe, the remote freelance crowdtesters are recruited by StarDust (recruitment process with online QA exam and interview). Once included in the WE ARE TESTERS Community, they apply for exploratory test campaigns offered to them, use their own tools (smartphones, desktops, software) then make their bug reports in the StarDust bug tracker 'BugTrapp'. To provide a detailed bug list to a client, the StarDust in-house Campaign Manager validates the test results delivered by crowdtesters. The results are then forwarded to the end customer via BugTrapp.
Continuously available, crowd bug chasing offers project owners rapid response in taking care of the tests.