Never before has it been so easy to develop, release and distribute software to a huge audience of potential users. With 800 million iOS devices and a staggering 1.4 billion Android devices sold in the last nine years, today’s developers have access to an audience that’s truly massive.
Accessing this audience means developing an app that’s useful — an app that solves problems and enhances people’s lives. It also means developing an app that’s high quality, from its look and feel to its stability, performance and usability.
This is where quality assurance comes into the picture. Before any app reaches a big audience on the App Store or Play Store, it needs to be thoroughly tested to make sure it’s free of glitches and stability issues that prevent it from performing properly.
More bugs means fewer users, lower ratings and, if your app is monetized, less income. Luckily, just like it’s never been easier to develop and release a mobile application, it’s also never been easier to thoroughly QA test your app before its release.
Crowdtesting is a form of crowdsourced QA testing that lets you tap into thousands of individual testers to find bugs in your app before it’s released. It’s testing at a massive scale, and it offers several huge benefits for developers eager to release high quality, stable, optimized software.
Are you developing the next big mobile app? Whether you’re building an app for a small, clearly defined audience or creating the next Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, read on to discover four major benefits of crowdtesting your app before its release.
Scale
Traditional QA testing involves hiring an internal quality assurance team, training testers, buying devices, automating certain processes, carrying out manual tests and much more. It also means spending a huge amount of time and money on your app before it’s even released.
In short, it’s something that’s out of reach for all but the biggest developers. Building a QA team at scale just isn’t something a small or medium-sized business can do internally, since the cost of assembling even a modest QA testing team is high.
One of the biggest benefits of crowdtesting is that it lets you test your software at scale without having to build your own team. Instead of hiring testers one by one, you can access thousands of dedicated testers within minutes, giving you access to QA testing on a truly massive scale.
This scale means more eyes to review each section of your app, more tests to make sure all of your app’s functions work properly and a greater ability to detect uncommon bugs that can pass by a smaller, in-house testing team unnoticed and unfixed.
Device diversity
One of the most challenging aspects of mobile QA testing is achieving device diversity. As we mentioned earlier, over 800 million iOS devices and 1.4 billion Android devices have been sold since 2007. Can you afford to QA test your application on each and every device internally?
Unless you’re part of a multi-billion dollar company, the answer to the above question is likely no. Assembling a pool of devices that’s diverse enough to represent your target audience is a serious challenge — carrying out so many different tests is an even greater challenge.
Another serious benefit of crowdtesting is that it gives you immediate access not just to scale, but to device diversity. Instead of buying or emulating (often inaccurately) every device you’re releasing your app on, you can access them through the sheer scale of the crowd.
From older versions of the iPhone to the latest devices from Samsung, HTC and Sony, using the crowd to test your application gives you access to device and operating system diversity that’s impractical, if not impossible, to achieve with an internal QA testing team.
Speed
You need results, and you need them fast. Can you perform thousands of detailed, complex QA tests on your own as a small app development business? Another advantage of crowdtesting is that its scale lets you generate actionable, statistically significant results very, very quickly.
With more than 35,000 testers and almost 19,000 different devices, the scale of MyCrowd QA gives you results quickly. A testing process that would take weeks of internal work can be managed in days (or even hours), giving you the results you need far faster than any other testing option.
This speed means you can release your application sooner, with far fewer worries about bugs or stability issues holding it back from reaching its potential. You get to reliable testing results when you need them instead of weeks after you begin the QA testing process.
Value
The final benefit of crowdtesting is value. Since you only pay for discovered bugs, testing your app, website or email campaign using an on-demand crowdtesting platform lets you QA test at just a fraction of the cost of performing similar tests internally.
Add in the savings you achieve from never having to purchase different devices and the value of crowdsourced QA testing becomes even greater. You get access to higher quality testing at far lower costs than what you’d pay to QA test using traditional methods.
The end result is an application that’s optimized for performance, free of major bugs, released on schedule and — frequently as a result of the crowdtesting process — completely QA tested at or under its target budget.
Access the MyCrowd on-demand crowdtesting platform today
Whether you’re releasing a mobile app or launching an email marketing campaign, great quality assurance is the key to achieving great results. MyCrowd QA, an on-demand crowdtesting platform lets you access more than 35,000 experts to QA test your mobile app, landing page or email template.
