Crowdtesting - Adapting As You Grow

In any given week, we advise tens of companies globally about how crowdtesting will best fit in their stack. Be it a startup or Fortune 500 – engineering, product, and QA leaders see value in having unbiased eyes testing their products, but how this manifests into an implementation varies greatly by the maturity of the organization.

For companies with development teams (including product and QA) under 30 people – crowdtesting is a very efficient way to scale early QA. The release landscape generally looks like this: limited test automation/unit test coverage, the entire team testing on their own devices, and hotfixes immediately following general availability(GA) release. It's a process plagued with inefficiency, and the opportunity costs associated with pulling teams off core projects are massive for small teams. That is why many choose to add a crowd to the QA mix – executing ad hoc and in-sprint tests via the crowd – which compresses test time, focuses teams efforts, and gives lean development teams the confidence to ship, faster.

In the Enterprise, crowdtesting is often a small piece of the QA landscape. In these organizations, release processes can be so mature that a developer can push new code into production within minutes, following a successful pass of the automation suite. However, savvy engineering and product leaders understand that automated tests do not replace human eyes and so they push to the crowd before GA as a risk reduction strategy at scale. In these situations, test IO integrates with CI/CD platforms (Travis, CircleCI, Jenkins, etc…) via the test IO API and bug trackers (Jira, Azure DevOps, Pivotal, etc…) – such that when a new build is ready to be pushed, a crowdtest is triggered automatically in parallel with test automation. Ensuring not only green lights on the dashboard, but that real end-users on the devices customers use have flawless experiences before (and into) GA release.

Then there is mid-market and everything in between. In times of chaos/organizational change, crowdtesting can provide much-needed air cover as the dust settles and your company simply needs baseline coverage. Crowdtesting is highly adaptable; process maturity (or lack thereof) determines the extent of the workflow integrations to pursue – but at the end of the day – the goal is the same for any org. Successful product releases are business-critical events – and test IO is proud to have helped hundreds of companies launch successful products since our founding in 2011.

If you would like to learn more or see how crowdtesting could fit in your development landscape, drop us a line at [email protected] or click here.