There are numerous ways to discover bugs in software. Bug hunting — a form of exploratory testing within crowdtesting designed to find and identify bugs as quickly and efficiently as possible — is one of the best ways to discover your software’s vulnerabilities so that they can be fixed before release.
What is a bug hunt?
A bug hunt is a robust explorative test that finds bugs and vulnerabilities in websites or mobile apps. In a bug hunt, testers will carry out functional testing with the specific purpose of finding defects in a website or app’s functionality, compatibility or content.
To find bugs in a website or application, testers use a variety of strategies. Some use “attacks” such as deliberately using a different workflow to the one suggested by an application, or filling in a form incorrectly to expose errors and security vulnerabilities.
Testers might enter alphabetic characters into a form field that’s clearly designed only to handle numeric characters, use special characters in a username or password field, or deliberately lose mobile data coverage while using an application.
Bug hunters also use test plans and use cases to test software from the perspective of a user, all with the goal of discovering bugs that could affect the user experience. The main goal of a bug hunt is to find all of the critical bugs in an application that could negatively affect users.
Why should you bug hunt your software?
The obvious benefit of bug hunting is that it helps you discover bugs in your software for your development team to fix before release.
There are also secondary benefits of bug hunting. A bug hunt can help you discover patterns in your website or mobile app’s design that produce several similar bugs. Since bug hunting is an ongoing task that involves heavy use of your app, it can also help you find UI and UX issues.
How MyCrowd QA makes bug hunting simple
Our crowdtesting platform is ideal for bug hunting, making it easy for you to find blind spots and bugs in your software before your customers.
With over 30,000 testers in the USA and abroad and more than 50,000 devices, MyCrowd has incredible user and device diversity. This lets you test your website or mobile app on every OS, device and browser combination imaginable.
Better yet, all of our test devices are real hardware. While bug hunting on emulated hardware can help you find some bugs, it can also result in false positives and a number of bugs going unnoticed due to the difference between real hardware and an emulator.
Finally, MyCrowd QA is 50-75% less expensive than expanding your current QA team to run your own bug hunt. Instead of hiring contractors or long-term staff for an one-off process, you can tap into the crowd on demand for your bug hunts and functional QA tests.
Run your first bug hunt with MyCrowd QA
Whether you’re launching a new website, developing a mobile app or preparing a new version of your web-based software, bug hunting is an essential part of releasing a product that’s ready for end users.
Sign up for MyCrowd today and access over 30,000 testers in the USA and internationally for your first bug hunt.
