Ubertesters CEO, Ran Rachlin, talks about crowd-testing for business in 2020

According to a new market research report “Crowdsourced Testing Market by Testing Type” published by MarketsandMarkets™, the global Crowdsourced Testing Market size is expected to grow from USD 1.3 billion in 2019 to USD 2.0 billion by 2024. The market size of crowdsourced testing in 2020 is forecasted at ~USD 1.5 billion.
The crowd testing model uses real people with real devices to perform tests under real operating conditions, providing near-instant feedback of the digital product under actual operating conditions.

The 2020 expected growth in crowdsourced testing is mainly because of the following reasons: 

• The growing digital transformation across the globe
• The trend to rapidly develop software and release the app/website to the public as soon as possible
• Continuous testing as part of Agile development and DevOps
• The enterprises need the flexibility and speed to scale testing procedures efficiently and reduce time-to-market
• Crowdsourced testing is affordable and cost-effective (reduces the need for in-house resources such as QA people or devices) while providing wide geographic coverage (testers and devices)
• Significant increase in enterprise application development that is conducted remotely in several parts of the word

While many believe that automation testing will control the future of digital testing, this forecasted market growth of crowd testing proves them wrong.  Automated tests are important and are great for testing specific aspects of functionality, but they can’t always address the complexity of finding potential problems related to usability, reliability, performance, compatibility and other quality criteria.
An automated test only checks what is been programmed to check.
In my experience, the majority of the bugs seem to be found by “accident” (exploring the app) because in each session we test in a different way and not just follow a given path (like in automation).

Further, automated tests don’t typically cover test scenarios past common use such as extreme use or for testing complex applications with external dependencies.
Automated testing follows specific scripts, but real testing requires domain knowledge, a focused, unbiased mind and a willingness to learn the product. To properly test a digital product, to understand the user’s way of using the product, human intelligence is always required. 

The growing demand for crowed sourced testing in 2020 will go beyond the ‘classic’ crowd testing of usability and functionality testing. The future of crowd testing in 2020 will include more localization testing, security testing, accessibility testing, interrupt testing, performance testing, and voice testing. Further, the growing market of IoT technologies and devices will increase the demand for the crowd of testers that own the specific IoT devices to be tested and perform global testing on these devices.   

Lastly, if in the past mobile applications were the main targets for crowd testing, in 2020, and the following years, we will see more and more website testing. Website testing focuses mainly on its reliability, performance, and functionality and to solve browser fragmentation issues. What testers need to check is the responsiveness, compliance, functioning by user-type, by browse type, and the effectivity in providing a better customer experience. 

Crowdsourced testing is here to stay and the need will only grow in 2020 and the following years to come. Crowd testing is still the best, most flexible and affordable way to put your digital product in the hands of many real users that fit your demographics, with real devices for in-depth market insights. 

Launch your digital product with confidence with the much better customer experience and faster time to market with the Ubertesters crowd of testers.