Enhancing Engineering Efficiency Through Crowdtesting

In software engineering and testing, efficiency is key. Speed and efficiency, however, are not necessarily synonymous, especially not at scale.

Automated testing, while useful, often falls short in the big picture, which leads to higher costs and a narrower testing scope. Engineers frequently spend more time maintaining automated tests than writing new code, hardly the best use of their talents.

So, what’s a better answer for efficiency gains? Crowdtesting offers a powerful solution that leverages a global community of testers to enhance software quality, reduce technical debt and free up engineering resources for more critical tasks. Let’s walk through how crowdtesting fits within modern dev environments and unlocks efficiency gains.

The Role of Crowdtesting in Modern DevOps

In modern DevOps toolchains, the tools should ultimately improve the process. If tools get in the way or introduce friction, they’re immediately counterintuitive to the objective of DevOps. When done with an experienced partner, crowdtesting integrates seamlessly into the DevOps pipeline, both early in the software development lifecycle (SDLC) and in production environments.

By shifting left — testing earlier in the development process — crowdtesting helps serve as the first line of defense, enabling organizations to identify issues before they become costly problems. Automated testing typically focuses on catching bugs during the later stages of development, often leading to delays and higher remediation costs. Implementing crowdtesting at various stages, from development to pre-production, introduces an external perspective on your digital products, ensuring a broader range of issues are identified and resolved early.

When organizations offload some of the testing responsibilities to crowdtesters, engineering experiences efficiency gains by focusing on unit tests and core development. This division of labor not only demonstrably improves the quality of the code but also speeds up the development process — speed and quality both improve.

Organizations can integrate crowdtesting seamlessly into existing CI/CD pipelines, basically whenever the product is stable enough to use. As code progresses through various stages — QA1, QA2 and pre-prod — crowdtesters can run smoke tests and other checks to ensure each stage is stable before moving to the next.

By shifting right — in production environments — organizations gain insights into how the product works in the hands of actual users. For too many DevOps organizations, feedback mechanisms rely heavily on telemetry data, with metrics that track performance, usage statistics and automated alerts from tools like PagerDuty. However, these tools often lack perspectives from real users, such as usability issues and functional defects that trigger crashes or suboptimal performances in real-world environments.

Crowdtesting provides real-time feedback from actual users that match target customer personas, helping to capture nuanced issues faster than telemetry — if the telemetry catches the issue at all. For instance, while telemetry can indicate a system crash, it might not report a critical usability flaw that frustrates users.

In the case of Applause's global crowdtesting model, our digital experts return feedback as quickly as 2 to 4 hours, compared to the days or weeks it might take for telemetry-based feedback to surface. This rapid turnaround helps teams address issues swiftly, as opposed to one of the two ways issues typically surface:

• Tech support eventually discovers the issue from a customer, which might or might not be handled immediately, depending on their alignment with engineering, potentially leading to further delays.
• Customers share the issue publicly on social channels or app reviews, causing damage to the brand reputation.

In an age where churn is high and word spreads rapidly, there is a real and direct cost of poor experiences.

Benefits of Crowdtesting in DevOps

DevOps aims to improve collaboration between development and operations teams, automate workflows and deliver software faster and more reliably. The outcome that many DevOps organizations hope to achieve is seamless, high-quality and continuously improving software as a result of fewer bugs reaching production and faster feature updates.

Crowdtesting ultimately helps achieve these outcomes in the following ways.

1. Increased efficiency and focus - Crowdtesting enables engineering teams to concentrate on their primary tasks by outsourcing to a diverse group of testers. These testers validate various user environments and use cases, uncovering issues that might elude internal QA professionals in a controlled testing environment. By prioritizing defects the crowd found based on severity and impact, engineering teams can quickly act on these critical issues, reducing the defect backlog and preventing the accumulation of technical debt. This aligns with DevOps principles by streamlining workflows, minimizing distractions from core tasks and ensuring that teams maintain focus on developing new and improved features.
2. Improved feedback loop - Crowdtesting ensures faster identification and resolution of defects via the global crowd. Unlike traditional telemetry, which often delays issue detection until after deployment, crowdtesting offers proactive and rapid insights into the user experience and functional issues during the development cycle. Real-time feedback loops allow for quicker iterations and more responsive development processes. By integrating crowdtesting into the DevOps process, teams can continuously test and refine their products, maintaining high standards of quality and user satisfaction, a fundamental goal of DevOps.
3. Reduced technical debt - Early defect detection through crowdtesting minimizes long-term technical debt. By identifying and addressing issues during the development cycle, teams can prevent the accumulation of unresolved defects that can slow down future development efforts, either through devs repairing code or indirectly through infrastructure or third-party issues. This proactive approach allows teams to maintain a cleaner codebase and avoid the compounded costs of fixing defects later in the development process. Crowdtesting complements automated testing already in use by the organization by catching additional defects, edge cases and user experience issues, ensuring comprehensive coverage. This approach aligns with DevOps practices, emphasizing the importance of maintaining a sustainable and efficient development environment.
4. Enhanced usability - Crowdtesting captures user experience issues that telemetry might miss, especially when led by experienced UX researchers that can source targeted participants and analyze findings. By involving real users in the testing process, organizations can ensure that the product not only functions correctly but also provides a satisfying user experience. This human-centric approach helps identify and address subtle usability issues that automated tests fail to detect, such as navigation difficulties, layout inconsistencies and points of friction. Ensuring a positive user experience is critical for product adoption and retention, and aligns with DevOps practices that prioritize customer satisfaction and product quality.

The Applause Difference

Crowdtesting with Applause offers a myriad of benefits for DevOps and engineering teams, from enhanced efficiency and reduced technical debt to improved user perception. By integrating a strategic crowdtesting approach in the DevOps pipeline, teams can catch issues early, reduce distractions and ultimately deliver higher quality products — all aligning with the fundamental principles of the approach.

In fact, a recent IDC report indicated Applause customers realized substantial efficiency benefits by working with Applause, including:

• 681 hours of staff time saved per release.
• 13% higher dev team productivity.
• Average annual benefit of $1,620,400 in testing staff efficiencies.

Let’s chat today to explore how crowdtesting can enhance your development process and deliver wins with customers.