How Does Crowdsourced Testing Fit in a DevOps World?

DevOps is a transformational move– culture-wise, people-wise, and technology-wise. Encouraging and enabling businesses to accomplish their customer-driven business objectives, DevOps addresses collaboration and sharing of responsibilities while maintaining an efficient communication channel between everyone involved. With practices getting automated, processes become modernized to achieve the best-quality applications at the end of each cycle

DevOps is breaking organizational silos to build a shared working ecosystem among the development and operations teams. This release of hierarchal barriers and departmental walls points to a more cooperative outlook in an application’s buildout, from conceptualization and design to achievement and deployment. The hand-in-hand relationship of DevOps with automation supports the fulfillment of ‘continuous’ requirements created by the dynamic IT environment of today. While automation wins over ordinary tasks, extraordinary tasks need human intelligence.

As far as software testing is concerned, automation can be very helpful and efficient in writing and executing common test scripts, conducting repetitive test runs, and identifying vulnerabilities that a human eye might drop. Despite the extent and detail that automation brings, it lacks a creative vision. Due to this, human supervision cannot be fully obliterated from a software development life cycle. This is where crowdsourced testing can appear to the rescue. Playing the role of pseudo-automation, crowd-sourcing software testing can deliver in the speed of automated tools accompanying with the creativity of human testers in real-life test environments.

The paradoxical relationship of crowd-sourcing with DevOps

With crowd-sourcing, one CI/CD pipeline gets furcated to many crowd testers. DevOps methodology propagates the co-existence of all teams during a joint software development environment. Crowd-sourcing goes directly against this propaganda because it involves testers from numerous remote locations performing on a standard project. Communicating and coordinating with these remote testers are often a particularly time-consuming activity, which ultimately defies the DevOps motto of collaboration at speed. This creates a paradoxical situation for DevOps practitioners who have the charge to deploy quality products at the top of every cycle.

In order to get rid of this paradox, there’s an innate got to close any existing communication gaps between the crowdsourced testers and therefore the organizations employing their services. it’s critical to obviously dictate the client requirements before the initiation of the testing phase to make sure that the proper QA approach is taken by the gang testers. Scheduled feedbacks at regular intervals are important to ascertain if the remote testing team goes in the right direction. Continuous feedbacks also allow developers to integrate any changes instantly to the code and to finish the cycle within the set timeframe.

Cloud – the last word enabler of crowdsourced testing

By removing the necessity for heavy infrastructure, the cloud leads to a significant decrease in costs. Cloud adoption has been a serious factor contributing to the rising popularity of crowd testing among organizations. With cloud-based platforms and data centers, sharing inputs has become convenient for gang testers. Data management becomes efficient, and alteration integration becomes faster through the cloud.

Filling the skill gap through remote testers

The shift to DevOps methodology has created severe gaps within the skill sets of obtainable resources. The software development teams of a corporation might or won’t have the specified skill sets. In such cases, crowd-sourcing the testing activities proves to be useful. Organizations can source remote testers having the talents that are missing from their in-house teams, thus empowering a holistic DevOps QA approach.

Tackling resource scarcity, but compromising security?

The importance of security within the modern, dynamic IT environment can’t be stressed enough. With evolving technologies and proliferating IoTs, the tech gurus are constantly presented with newer security challenges. The more advanced technology is, the higher are the safety concerns, demanding more stringent security measures.

The responsibility for creating a secure application is shared equally by the whole team during a DevOps setup, giving rise to the concept of DevSecOps. Utilizing crowdsourced testing services within the current cybersecurity scenario is like delivering the appliance to hackers on a plate. Well, there are certainly risks, but as they assert – risk takers are the last word winners. Otherwise, why tech giants like Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, GitHub, and lots of others would rollout expensive bug bounty programs?

Operational scalability with Crowdsourced testing

Crowd-sourcing equips a corporation to leverage the talents of various talented testers without actually hiring them. there’s no need for investing in resource management and infrastructural installations to scale the operations. With crowdsourced testing, organizations can effectively scale their teams and operations, while reducing the time to plug.

The end goal of DevOps implementation is scalability, which is why automation is imperative. Crowdsourced QA testing help achieve that alongside flexibility, quality, efficiency, and speed.

Use cases for crowd testing solutions

The remote location and geographical disparity of the crowdsourced testers make it possible to receive an application’s performance reviews under different, real-life environment conditions also as network conditions. additionally to providing the hands-on user experience feedback, the gang testers are often instrumental in understanding load handling capabilities of an application, enabling the in-house team to optimize the app’s performance accordingly.

A final word

DevOps adoption is seeing a surge as industry leaders are now starting to understand its importance. As DevOps go mainstream, it’s become synonymous with top-quality applications. From waterfall to Agile and DevOps, from large data centers to comprehensive cloud solutions, from manual to automation, the IT sector is evidently involved during a continuous cycle of innovation.

Moving above and beyond automation, crowd testers are stemming a kind of pseudo-automated QA method for an application. Despite the prevalent apprehension thanks to the safety concerns, crowd-sourcing an organization’s QA processes usher in more advantages than disadvantages. The fit of crowdsourced testing in DevOps is more adaptive than fixed, which is why it’s sensible and cost-effective thanks to quality assurance.

At TestUnity, we standardize efforts and ensure accelerated time to plug with DevOps testing solutions. We also specialize in delivering improved deployment quality with greater operational efficiency. TestUnity’s testing specialists enable your application testing efforts with their rich experience in Continuous Integration (CI) testing and may configure and execute popular CI tools helping client’s DevOps teams. Contact us today to leverage our in-depth expertise in DevOps QA.

TestUnity

Testunity is a SaaS-based technology platform driven by a vast community of testers & QAs spread around the world, powered by technology & testing experts to create the dedicated testing hub. Which is capable of providing almost all kind of testing services for almost all the platforms exists in software word.