Supercharge Your Sanity Testing with Crowd

What is a sanity check? It can be defined as a quick evaluation of software to ensure that a recent change or fix is functioning properly. It is typically performed on early development builds, just before full regression testing. This process focuses on verifying the core functionalities rather than hunting for all possible bugs. It’s a simple and efficient way to confirm that the software is operating as expected before moving on to more in-depth testing.

The objective of sanity testing is to verify that a small update or bug fix works correctly and hasn’t interfered with any existing functionality. According to a report by HackerRank, deploying untested or flawed code is a leading cause of production issues. As a result, conducting sanity tests is crucial to ensure the software is properly tested.

As per sources like Medium, this process plays a pivotal role in the early stages of SDLC. Let us now dig deeper into how to improve sanity testing and other aspects of this process.

Why is Sanity Testing Important?

By concentrating on key functional areas, sanity checking verifies that the essential components of the software are operating correctly, giving the development team the assurance to move forward.

Saving time and resources

A sanity test is a straightforward procedure that offers immediate feedback at a very short interval. This eliminates the need to spend a significant amount of time conducting thorough testing, ensuring that the application operates as expected by both developers and customers.

Verifying essential functionalities 

Sanity testing allows developers to quickly evaluate the core functionality of the system and ensure it performs as expected after major changes. This helps reduce the time and cost associated with detecting, avoiding, and resolving any issues that arise from these modifications.

Enhancing overall quality assurance

Some may ask, “What is sanity testing in QA?” Sanity tests ensure that even minor modifications do not disrupt the functionality already in place. The sanity testing serves as a quick safety net to identify problems that were not anticipated.

Preventing further development of faulty builds

Sanity tests can discover code refactoring opportunities and provide immediate feedback on system performance. Developers can improve code efficiency and reliability by routinely running these tests to uncover performance issues and prevent further development on faulty builds.

When to Perform Sanity Testing

Sanity testing is conducted at particular points in the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). The right time to find out the sanity score is:

• Just after the software successfully passes the smoke test
• Following small modifications or bug fixes in the code
• When new features are added to verify they integrate smoothly with the existing system
• Right before deploying the application to production

Sanity testing is carried out following the successful completion of the smoke exam. More thorough testing, such as functional and/or regression testing, is conducted if sanity testing is successful as well. This method guarantees premium software quality and helps avert more issues. If a whole testing cycle is conducted without sanity testing, the efforts will probably be in vain.

Benefits of Combining Sanity Testing with Crowd Testing

CX Index found that over 90% of organizations, regardless of the sector they operate in, prioritize customer experience. That’s why, In order to launch better digital products, developers often choose crowd-testing as the most effective method. This approach involves conducting large-scale quality assurance testing or UX testing. The testing process is carried out by a large group of professional testers or beta testers from all over the world using devices under real-life scenarios. 

Enhanced coverage and accuracy

Crowd testing leverages a diverse group of testers from different locations and backgrounds, offering a broad perspective on how the software performs in various real-world scenarios. This increased diversity leads to better detection of edge cases, usability issues, and potential bugs, resulting in more accurate feedback.

Faster identification of issues and scalability

Developers can quickly examine the program across multiple situations with a big group of testers. With several testers at once, they can get comments and find errors faster than with traditional testing. Fixing flaws early in development saves time and money.\

Cost and time efficiency

Fixing flaws early in development saves time and money. Also, the early detection of problems and the enhancement of software quality are two ways in which crowdtesting offers a higher return on investment (ROI). Moreover, it significantly reduces time-to-market (TTM) when done efficiently. 

Access to a wider range of devices and environments

With crowd testing, our testers test your application across a wide variety of devices, operating systems, and environments. This ensures that your software works seamlessly, regardless of the hardware or conditions customers use, reducing the risk of compatibility issues and improving the overall reliability of the product.

Real-world testing scenarios 

Crowd testers are people who will be using your software and can give you honest comments on how well it works and how easy it is to use. They use apps that real buyers prefer, providing information that matches what potential customers want and finding possible issues or areas for improvement.

Combining sanity testing with crowd testing offers a powerful approach to ensuring software quality and reliability. Cost effective sanity testing quickly verifies that critical functions work after minor changes or significant fixes and add-ons. When paired with crowd testing, which involves leveraging a diverse group of testers from various backgrounds and locations, the benefits are multiplied.

1. Comprehensive Coverage: While sanity testing focuses on specific areas to ensure recent changes haven’t broken functionality, crowd testing brings in a wide range of user perspectives, helping to uncover edge cases and usability issues that core development team might miss 
2. Faster Feedback: Sanity testing in software testing provides quick validation of the most critical app aspects, allowing crowd testers to focus on exploring the software more deeply and providing valuable feedback faster. This combined approach accelerates the identification and resolution of issues.
3. Enhanced Real-World Testing: Crowd testing simulates real-world usage scenarios across different devices, operating systems, and environments. When sanity testing confirms that core features are functioning properly, crowd testers can then explore how these features perform in diverse, real-world conditions, offering insights that traditional testing methods might not reveal.
4. Cost-Effective Quality Assurance: Sanity testing ensures that the application is stable enough to guarantee further exploration, while crowd testing provides a cost-effective way to identify potential issues with the involvement of a broad user base.
5. Improved User Experience: The combination of sanity audit with the broader reach of crowdtesting helps to deliver a more polished, user-friendly product. By catching critical issues early and gathering diverse feedback, developers can make targeted improvements.

Thus, crowd testing is not a sanity check alternative – it’s rather a great addition to it.

How to Implement Crowd Testing in Sanity Testing

The global crowdsourced testing market size is predicted to grow from $1.60 billion in 2024 to $3.64 billion by 2032. Companies that haven’t already implemented this approach are actively starting to hire corresponding personnel to launch this process combined with sanity testing best practices.

To integrate crowd-testing into your sanity-testing process, follow these steps: 

1. Define the objectives and scope of the examination
2. Select a crowd testing platform
3. Create and distribute test cases
4. Monitor and manage the testing process
5. Analyze user feedback
6. End up by driving continuous improvement through ongoing feedback loops.

Conclusion

Sanity testing checks that a simple update or bug patch on one or a few portions of the digital product works as planned. Preliminary testing before regression testing is common. Smoke testing is a more comprehensive test that checks the most important application functionality, while sanity testing just checks specific functionality after changes.

To get the greatest sanity testing results, clearly specify the testing scope, employ automated tools, and examine the findings to find areas that need more testing. Also, mixing sanity with crowdtesting is a good idea. Combining sanity testing with crowd testing creates a balanced, efficient testing strategy that ensures both stability and comprehensive, real-world coverage while saving on costs.

Looking to dive deeper into the benefits of crowd-testing? Reach out to us at sales@ubertesters.com for an in-depth exploration.