Software Quality Testing essentially validates that the final product meets the desired quality standard.
Crowd testing is when a large group of people with diverse backgrounds try your product and then provide you with helpful feedback on usability, bugs and features. If your product depends on the diversity of the crowd it is important to know what the people in the crowd can or cannot do. These people are not buyers of your product, nor have intention of buying it in the future. Customers and potential buyers can be great testers, but hard to find issues are detected usually by Software Quality Analysts.
Crowd testing is a broad but effective means of ensuring that all aspects are covered. Crowd testing can be used as an add-on prior to production release. This will be effective in catching any prevailing User Interface defects. The most important aspect of Crowd testing is to create a crowd that is composed out of a large group of diverse people. Crowd can be a group of test experts, domain experts, users and people from different background. A larger Crowd will add value. The product owner decides on the type of Crowd to be used for testing.
Crowd testing can be used for testing mobile applications as well. This crowd consists of diverse and talented group of people. You can tap into the skills and knowledge of billions of people worldwide.
Crowd testing is independent of the software development methodology. It can be used in both adaptive and predictive scenarios. Crowd testing can use the creativity and diversity of various testers around the world and not just a small user group to accept the software. It complements traditional testing. Normal test runs are still needed in previous test levels. Thus, organizations need to adapt a strategy that blends traditional and crowd testing approaches.
