How Crowd Testing Can Improve Software Quality and Time-to-Market

Improving software quality and decreasing the time-to-market are often included in the list of the most critical company goals. However, reaching both targets at the same time is often too difficult.

The good news is that using the crowd test model in software testing can help businesses bring the quality of products and improve time-to-market within the shortest terms. But how crowd testing can be useful for your company? How can it positively impact your time-to-market?

Why is time-to-market so important?

Businesses need to survive and develop in extremely competitive business environments. If you hit the market first, your company gains a chance to become a leader in your niche. Your brand becomes more recognizable, which allows you to dominate in the chosen field while the other companies are only entering the market. In other words, fast time-to-market can give you a significant first-mover advantage.

Pros of speeding up time-to-market:

• Boost revenues. The faster you hit the market, the sooner you will start gaining profits.
• Lower cost. The amount of time you spend on developing a product directly impacts your expenses.
• Gain a larger market share. If you are one of the first companies to enter the market, customers will try your product since they don’t have a wide choice of alternative products yet.
• Customer satisfaction. Customers appreciate the quick availability of new products and services and it increases their trust and satisfaction.

While speed is important, it is crucial not to fall into the trap of launching the product too soon, before it went through the appropriate and complete quality assurance process. The last thing you want is to launch an immature product that may cause huge damage.

Why QA becomes a bottleneck

Quality assurance is a complex process that usually requires many company resources. First, it is crucial to test your product at each stage of the development process which involves many professionals, including testers, developers, and managers. Second, it is often difficult to cover a huge number of devices, carriers, and locations for testing to emulate your actual target market – many digital products are used by users globally and it is a must to work well with all (or at least the most popular ones).

Lack of time and resources along with other quality management issues, and the fact that it is not wise to launch a non-tested product, often lead to significant bottleneck testing problems. So, how to avoid process bottlenecks?

How to Unblock Your QA Bottleneck

There are several methods to unblock the quality assurance (QA) bottleneck. It is better to combine many or even all of the following methods to achieve better results.

1. Refine Processes. Analyze and identify where the bottlenecks are and then remove unnecessary bureaucracy and improve communication between all the members of the QA process.
2. Use automation. Automation can help you speed up the quality assurance process and avoid manual testing of short repetitive pieces of code. It can’t replace manual testing, but it can save some time and effort.
3. Improve flexibility. Put new tools and technologies into practice (consider cloud-based tools), monitor the customers’ requirements and expectations, and get ready to implement changes fast.
4. Use continuous testing. Testing on all stages of product development improves early bug identification and significantly decreases the risks of failure to meet the product launch deadlines.
5. Use crowd testing to increase capacity. Crowdsourced testing is the most important solution for bringing your software quality to a higher level by scaling your testing efforts and speeding up time-to-market.
6. Perform exploratory testing. Testers are given the freedom to explore the product (free-style testing) and identify potential issues.

What do you get with crowd testing?

• Offload tasks from the in-house team. Having more professionals for testing makes the entire testing process faster and more effective.
• Increased coverage. Crowd testing allows testing from a variety of perspectives and devices, increasing the chances of finding bugs that might have been missed in traditional testing methods.
• Get helpful feedback faster. Receiving opinions from experienced testers will allow you significantly reform your digital product and make it more attractive to customers.
• Cost-effectiveness. Crowd testing is a proven way to optimize your testing expenses by reducing the product’s testing costs.
• Scalability. Crowdsourced testing is easily scalable, allowing for an increase or decrease in testing bandwidths and resources as needed.
• Reduce testing time and improve bug resolution time. The higher the number of QAs that test your product, the faster you will get your detailed testing results. Moreover, the developers also get an opportunity to fix bugs and issues faster.
• Have an unbiased view of your product. Crowd testers have a fresh view of your digital product and can notice issues your in-house team fails to detect.
• Get on-demand availability of crowd testers. There is no need to hire extra testers to join your team for a short period before the product release. Experienced crowd testers are ready to help you anytime.
• Real-world testing. Crowdsourced testers test the product in real-world environments and scenarios, which can help to identify issues that may not have been detected in a controlled testing environment.
• The only way to test true localization issues (unless you wish to send your own team all over the globe to all target markets).
• Continuous testing. With crowdsourced testing, there is no need to wait for a specific time or place to start testing, which allows for continuous testing and quicker bug fixing.
• Personal service. You get a dedicated assigned project manager to manage the entire test cycle, thus, reducing your management overhead to almost zero.
• Improved customer satisfaction. By catching bugs and issues before a product is released, crowdsourced testing can improve customer satisfaction and reduce negative feedback.
• Advanced, high-end, comprehensive bug reporting tools. Crowd testing companies, that specialize in the QA process, can offer the most advanced tools for bug reporting so that your developers can easily reproduce the found issues and fix them.

Conclusion

In conclusion, crowd-testing remains the most effective service to elevate software quality to a higher level and significantly improve time-to-market. By leveraging the power of a diverse and global pool of testers, you get a chance to detect bugs faster, receive an unbiased opinion and valuable feedback from experienced professionals, and speed up the entire process of the product development while providing real-world insights from real users using real devices.

Crowd testing can also help to accelerate the testing process, reduce the time needed for bug fixing, and improve the overall quality of the product, ultimately leading to a faster time-to-market and increased customer satisfaction that will strengthen the brand significantly.

Want to explore even more about our advantages? Contact us at sales@ubertesters.com for more information.