What Is the Crowd Testing Life Cycle? A Complete Guide

Creating a winning and top-notch digital product, meeting the requirements and expectations of the customers, as well as developing a convenient and understandable solution are among the most important things for many companies. However, all these goals are not easy to reach. To make sure your product will be successful, it is crucial to pay attention to the advanced software testing process. 

Still, validating the app, writing test cases, and checking each tool and function of your application might often make the QA process too complicated and require inadequate time and resources. If you want to avoid facing these issues, crowd testing is here to help. This solution will allow you to overcome lengthy release processes, save costs, and get top-notch testing results within the shortest terms. So, what is crowdsourced testing? 

Crowd Testing Model: The Basics 

Crowd testing is one of the most innovative solutions for arranging the entire quality assurance process throughout the entire development life cycle. The core concept of this service is the ability to reach a large community of professional testers located in different parts of the world. In other words, you can get your digital product tested by dozens or even hundreds of QA experts or beta testers on real devices, carriers, and in a bunch of different locations. This solution is an imitation of real customers who will be using your application or product. The wide range of devices, operating systems, carriers, and geo zones make crowdsourced testing a unique and 100% convenient service used by many modern companies. 

It is important to note that, unlike in-house testing, crowdsourced testing has no limits or boundaries. Moreover, it is a fast, flexible, affordable, and handy solution for those businesses that lack resources to handle the entire testing procedure. 

How To Set Up Crowd Testing For Your Product

QA life cycle might contain numerous steps. If you would like to benefit from using a crowd testing service, it is better to keep in mind these parameters: 

Clarify an Objective

Why do you need to start using crowdsourced testing? What results would you like to get? What will a successful process mean to you? The answers to these questions will help the experts to come up with the best solution to fit all your needs. Moreover, it will help you save costs, dodge confusions, and avoid unnecessary actions.

Specify Your Target Audience

Who are the users of your digital product? What countries do they live in? What types of devices do they commonly use? Do they have any unique demographics? Identifying and segmenting the prospective users will allow you to pick up the testers who will represent your target audience and act like real customers in the most accurate way.

Develop Advanced Descriptions

What is your QA test plan? Do you have clear test cases? Do you prefer using exploratory testing methods only? What results (numbers, bugs, indices, etc.) do you expect to receive from a crowd testing team? Don’t forget to describe the deadlines, environments, and other specifications that might be helpful in a crowd testing process flow. 

Point Out the Weaknesses and Problem Areas 

If applicable, it is always a great idea to describe any issues you’ve already faced during the previous test execution process. Or, on the other hand, describe the known issues that you are already aware of. This simple tip will help you double-check whether these issues occur when the real users start using your app – the crowd testing experts will pay attention to examining the weak points of your digital product, while avoiding reporting the known issues. 

Have a Project Coordinator 

A dedicated project manager will help you keep in touch with the entire crowd testing life cycle. However, if you don’t have a person to assign for this role, an experienced crowd testing company will find an expert for your project (we also do!)

What is the Crowdtesting Process?

There are several crowd testing phases we usually come through in the basic software testing steps:

Phase I – Planning and Preparation 

From the customer side, it is necessary to have a clear vision of goals, requirements, and instructions. You can describe the test environments, give access to important settings and parameters, as well as come up with other unique specifications. It is important to have a real life kickoff call with the assigned project manager to make sure everything is clear. 

Phase II – Initiation & Configuration 

At this stage, it is essential to set up various scenarios to be tested. It is also important to set up specific functional or technical configurations. Once all is clear – the crowdsourced testing company will start building the team, by recruiting the right testers that fit the requirements. 

Phase III – Execution 

Here is a time when the crowdtesting professionals begin testing your digital product. The testers are guided and supervised by the project manager assigned. This tactic will allow you to meet the deadlines, track the work of the QA professionals, and receive feedback during testing. The best thing about using the ‘managed service’ offered by crowd testing company – you significantly reduce your management overhead. You have only one point of contact that will help you figure out any flaw in the testing process. 

Phase IV – Results evaluation

The final crowd testing stage of this cycle is results evaluation. You will receive all the reports, data, and suggestions on how to improve your product. You can also have access to the team’s performance since all the tests made are recorded and screenshots are provided. A good crowd testing company will have its own proprietary QA management platform to allow you great visibility of all issues and a good way to manage them.  

Phase V – Re-test

After the developers fixed all the detected bugs, it is crucial to re-test the product to make sure everything is now working properly. The reason is that some fixes might negatively impact the performance of other product’s functions. Moreover, some features might still fail to perform as expected. Therefore, it is always important to perform advanced testing even after successful bug fixing. 

Why Use Crowdtesting?

Ubertesters is one of the leading solutions among the biggest crowd testing companies. All our customers can get numerous advantages: 

• Flexibility: scale your testing process according to your needs and requirements;
• Diversity: feel free to specify the environment for performing tests, including locations, carries, operating systems, and devices;
• Resources: you can hire as many professional testers in as many countries as you need;
• Professional feedback: receive the reports on your app’s performance from dozens of QA experts from all over the world. 
• Affordability: using crowdtesting solutions is more budget friendly compared to hiring remote-based employees or dedicated QA teams. 

This list of benefits offered by Ubertesters is not complete. Want to know more? Contact us at
sales@ubertesters.com for more details.