There are several ways to QA test your website or application. You can do it internally with your own QA team. You can outsource to a third-party QA testing company. Or, you can run your own tests using a crowdtesting platform.
While in-house and outsourced QA testing do have benefits, they’re not for everyone. Costs and control limitations mean that unless you’re a big company, you’ll get far more out of crowdtesting than you will through traditional in-house QA.
Below, we’ve listed six of the biggest benefits of crowdtesting, from device and OS diversity to results-based pricing. Read on to learn more about how crowdtesting can improve your website or mobile app before you carry out your first test.
Results-Based Pricing Is More Affordable
In a traditional QA testing process, you pay the resources involved in testing, the hardware and software your testing process requires, and the tester’s time. As a result, even a brief QA testing process can be quite expensive — often too much for a small business with limited resources.
Since crowdtesting uses a pay-per-bug pricing model, there’s no need for you to pay for devices or time. Instead, you pay an affordable, predetermined fee for each bug that the testers discover in your app, resulting in greater transparency and more affordable pricing.
A Faster Testing Cycle
Traditional QA testing is about running deep tests with a small team. It’s a time consuming and costly process that leads to results, but takes a long time if you need to thoroughly test your app or website before its release.
Crowdtesting, on the other hand, is fast. Since you can run tests 24 hours a day and make use of a huge audience of testers, you can get real results and actionable data on your bugs in less time, letting you speed up your testing cycle and release your app ahead of schedule.
Device, OS and Browser Diversity
One of the biggest benefits of crowdtesting is that you have access to a diverse range of devices and browsers.
Instead of having to purchase new hardware to expand your testing diversity, you can tap into a massive audience of testers and devices. The scale of crowdtesting means that no device and OS combination is too rare for your QA testing process.
This device diversity results in more stable, less buggy applications that run not just on the most widely used devices, but on the long tail of devices, operating systems and browsers.
The Ability To Test When You Need To
Building an in-house QA testing team is a no-brainer for big companies, but it’s not economical for smaller businesses. Instead of only having a QA team when you need it, you end up with a QA team that’s there when you need it and when you don’t.
One of the biggest benefits of crowdtesting is that you can test whenever you need to, without having to pay for a QA testing team when you don’t need to test. You benefit from detailed QA testing results on demand without the ongoing costs of managing quality assurance in house.
Use Real World Testers To Get Live Results
Emulators are wonderful tools for development and testing, but they’re not perfect. When you test your app on a device emulator, you test it in a vacuum that doesn’t match the environment in which real people and customers operate.
Crowdtesting is built around the long tail of testers and devices, which means you can test your app or website on real hardware without virtualization or emulation. As a result, you get far more accurate test results that let you release smarter, better, less buggy apps.
Test in a Wide Range of Countries
Finally, crowdtesting lets you test your app in a huge range of countries. This lets you learn how your app performs when it’s used in a foreign language, on an international mobile network or in a different region.
From limited 3G and LTE access to regional restrictions on data usage, geographic factors can play a major role in determining how your app performs. Test your app internationally before its release and you’ll discover and fix bugs that could otherwise affect international users.
MyCrowd QA is a self-service QA testing platform for companies to test their mobile apps and software. Utilizing a pay-per-bug model, customers only pay for the bugs our testers find.
