Leveraging Crowdsourced Testing Is Not Everyones Cup Of Tea

The motto of crowdsourcing is to resolve the issue directly by the experts available in the form of open communities across the globe in a fast and cost effective manner. A study from Everest Group says crowdsourcing is the reason businesses are experiencing some well-needed cost advantages, throwing BPO outsourcing out the window. Crowdsourcing helps in accessing large talent pool and leveraging right skills, expertise, and knowledge that are available in the form of online communities across the globe. This feature of crowdsourcing plays most important role in gaining traction towards crowdsourced testing. Crowdsourced testing is seen as one of the most recent trends in the field of software testing by many analysts from Forrester and Gartner.

Crowdsourced testing helps enterprises achieve:

Ability to enter diverse platforms, languages, and people
Real insights from the experts across the world
Opportunity to test an app on various technological platform at the same time by hundreds of testers leading to better test coverage
Quick feedback from testing experts

What are the Inherent Risks?

Although crowdsourced testing carries several benefits along with it, there are several inherent risks which make it difficult for organization to use such sourcing model.

1) Diversified Culture: Crowdsourcing brings people from various geographical locations together in the form of online communities. Most of the talents in this talent pool or online communities are by default habitual of using their own corporate or consumer cultures. These cultures further extend to their use of technology resulting in the mentality of we have always done these things this way. As an outcome, the organizations also need to work on an integrated strategy for changing their mindsets thus leading to a new challenge.

2) Pricing: Pricing is also a challenge for organizations when it comes to crowdsourcing. There are various possible pricing models that an organization can adopt from:

Price per defect based on severity levels
Price based on total number of valid defects reported
Price for fixed number of hours throughout the project life cycle

3) Controlling the Crowd: Crowd being part of online communities which are open in nature makes it difficult for organization to control the crowd behavior and keep track of their project related activities. Confidentiality of data which is liability of the employer may also be lost to some extent. This untraceable nature of crowdsourcing may also result in plagiarized work.

4) Motivation: Due to amorphous nature of crowd and its huge size, an individual in community feels neglected and gets low accountability which might lead to dissatisfaction. Poor quality of work and missed timelines are the consequences of such dissatisfaction. Thus keeping these individuals motivated demands great effort from the organization.

5) Information Disclosure to the Community: Organizations only mention partial information about the task while posting it on the community page. The problem arises when worker in that community signs up an agreement with the organization and later on, upon receiving full project document realizes the fact that his skillset only matches the fractional requirements of that project. At that point of time, he has no option left in front of him but to quit the task. This affects his project completion rate which is stored in his employment history that can be viewed by employers thus putting a black mark on his performance.

Aforementioned challenges are not the only barriers in adopting crowdsourced testing. The fact that crowdsourced testing takes time and forming a logical structure to adopt it successfully adds further to the list. Given the enormous cost and skill outreach benefits of crowd, this sourcing model is gaining huge traction from the market. Though few organizations are successful in harvesting huge profits, not everyone in the market can outrun these challenges.