Crowdsoursing as an Alternative to Software Testing

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Introduction
Crowdsourcing is an emerging practice that has become an accelerating topic in Information Technology (IT) nowadays. Howe’s definition of Crowdsourcing (as cited in Brabham, 2008), is an act of a company, outsourcing the work previously performed by their employees to an undefined network of people in the form or an open call. (Murari and Atigadda, 2014) defines Crowdsourcing as a process of getting work from a crowd of people from an online community, rather than from traditional employees. In IT software application projects, crowdsourcing is an option for companies to outsource IT services from a crowd in an online community made possible through web-based platforms, such as cloud platform. There is a growing use for crowdsourcing on Software Testing (ST). This review analyse various literature that focuses on the use of crowdsourcing for software testing.
What is crowdsourced testing?

Software Testing is a highly expensive yet an important phase in software development, as this assures the quality of the developed software prior to implementation. To consider the potential of Crowdsourcing for ST, I considered some definition being used within IT. Crowdsourced testing or crowd testing, are derived from the terms crowdsourcing and software testing which are used to describe the practice of software testing using the crowd. (Speidel, 2013) define Crowdtesting as a “software testing methodology that leverages a community of external expert software testers with diverse backgrounds and demographics from all across the globe. It differs from the traditional approach in that testing is carried out by a larger number of testers from different places, rather than by a limited number of in-house testing professionals.” ...

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...or Usability Testing. Paper presented at ASIS&T 75th Annual Meeting, Baltimore, MD, USA.
Murari, R., & Atigadda, V. (2009, March). Panorama of Crowd Testing. TE Testing Experience, the Magazine for Professional Testers, (25), 58-60. Retrieved from http://www.testingexperience.com/
Speidel, D. (2014). Crowdsourced Software Testing for Enterprises. Retrieved from http://www.passbrains.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Crowdsourced-software-testing-for-enterprises.pdf
Steinhauser, M. (2009, March) Crowd Testing: An Addition to Traditional Software Testing. TE Testing Experience, the Magazine for Professional Testers, (25), 22-24. Retrieved from http://www.testingexperience.com/
Zogaj, S. & Bretschneider, U. (2013): Crowdtesting with testCloud: Managing the Challenges of an Intermediary. Retrieved from http://pubs.wi-kassel.de/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/JML_420.pdf

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