Personas and Redundancies in Crowdsourced Testing

Abstract

Crowdsourced testing is gaining a lot of attention these days. Crowdsourced testing utilizes testers which subscribe to an external or internal crowdsourcing platform. Usually these testers are distributed across geographies. Thus, such testing can be treated as a form of distributed testing. Crowdsourced testing, quite often, is used to perform exploratory testing in which testers test the features as per their wish. Such testing results in redundant testing efforts due to the lack of awareness of other testers' activities, thus does not yield the full benefits of crowdsourced testing in terms of speed and coverage. Moreover, as each tester possesses a testing style, the present model of crowdsourced testing does not fully utilize tester's strength or style. In this paper, we study various redundancies involved in a distributed testing. We also study testers' behavior to understand various testing styles. The study finds that there exists a lot of redundancies in testing efforts. The study also observes that testers indeed have different testing styles which should be understood more deeply for engaging them better. Our study shows that there is need for tools and strategies for allocating testing tasks that leverages testers' testing style and creates more awareness among the testers.