Software testing can be hard, expensive, complicated, and time consuming, but not when you do it the right way. Organisations face an enormous number of difficulties during a test cycle that limits their effectiveness. Choosing to crowdsource your software testing, rather than outsource it or keep it in-house, can help you avoid them. Not convinced? Here’s three reasons why.

Wasted time & money

Traditional software testing simply takes too long to give developers a large and representative sample size. Test cycles can blow out to weeks as the same dozen people trudge through your software with their various devices. This costs you money that could be put to better use fixing the program.

With crowdsourced testing, you’ll be able to cut your test cycles by up to 90 per cent. You can expand your testing footprint by exposing your software to more situations, more devices and more people. And you can do this in a fraction of the time, allowing you to make faster, better informed decisions.

​There’s such a thing as knowing the product too well

This will depend on the nature of the software you’re developing. If you’re building something for popular release with a general audience, it pays to look beyond your own backyard.  This could be a social networking app or a game, for example.

And in many cases they can miss bugs that will only be caught by someone with a beginner’s eye.

Choosing to crowdsource your software testing gets your app in the hands of real people, without the preconceptions that come from years of working in the industry. They’ll be able to give you a more honest appraisal of the software and are more likely to treat it as your ultimate end-users will, helping you find bugs now before it goes live.

​The need for a fresh & impartial approach to software testing

It’s an ugly truth, but sometimes office politics can get in the way of finding each and every bug. Whether it’s not wanting to tell someone superior that they wrote bad code or forcing the same engineer who wrote the program to report that they made a critical and costly mistake, there are so many seemingly petty things that can get in the way of producing the best possible software.

Crowd testing solves this by having an intermediary between the developers and testers. The developers will only be told the most relevant facts about the testers – their previous experience, their range of available devices and operating systems, etc. – and testers won’t have any emotional attachment to the company as they are working as freelancers. As the developer, you’ll be getting nothing but the unfiltered truth, so you can make the hard-headed decisions you need to in order to ensure you deliver the best possible product.