The Pros and Cons of Crowdsourced Testing

Crowdsourced testing, also known as crowdtesting, is a relatively new approach in the world of quality assurance. Instead of depending on your own team to test your app or website, you depend on a temporary workforce of individual testers. This makes crowdsourced testing an effective and affordable option for developers, but it can be one-sided and lead to ambiguous results.

Crowdsourced testing can be a great option for some, but not all. Here, we discuss the pros and cons of crowdtesting to determine if this method is right for you.

Pros

• Affordable: By relying on a workforce of temporary testers, you are reducing labor costs. You can test without having to pay a permanent employee’s salary or benefits.
• Efficient: With a crowdsourced team, you won’t have to make your employees test your products and add to their already large workload. Additionally, crowdsourced teams can work in bursts to manage peak workloads.
• Fast execution: With such a large group of people at your disposal, you’ll be able to find bugs and other issues faster than you would have with just your employees.
• Diversity: Crowdsourced teams use people from all over the world. This can be especially beneficial for localization testing.

Cons

• Poor understanding of brand: A crowdsourced team’s diversity comes at a price. Since they don’t work inside your company, they will have a poor understanding of your brand and mission.
• Lack of professional knowledge: A smaller, more qualified team of testers will be more knowledgeable about how and where to find bugs than a crowdsourced team.
• Confidentiality: With a crowdsourced team, you don’t know exactly who you’re getting. That’s because everything is kept confidential.
• One-sided: Depending on your crowdsourced vendor, you may not be able to communicate directly to testers. This can lead to more one-sided conversations.
• Subpar bug-writing skills: Crowdsourced testers are not professional quality assurance engineers and are not well-trained in how to write up issues so that the devs can easily recreate, understand, and fix defects. This lack of professionalism can lead to frustration amongst the dev team.

Here at Beta Breakers, we offer quality assurance testing for apps, websites, and more. Contact us today to get started!