Leveraging the Wisdom of the Crowd in Software Testing

Leveraging the Wisdom of the Crowd in Software Testing

This excerpt focuses on the crowd and the traits of a crowd that make it relevant to be engaged at various stages in the software engineering process.

Its scale, flexibility, cost effectiveness, and fast turnaround are just a few reasons why crowdsourced testing has received so much attention lately. While there are a few online resources that explain what crowdsourced testing is all about, there’s been a need for a book that covers best practices, case studies, and the future of this technique.

Filling this need, Leveraging the Wisdom of the Crowd in Software Testing shows you how to leverage the wisdom of the crowd in your software testing process. Its comprehensive coverage includes the history of crowdsourcing and crowdsourced testing, implementation practices, and future trends.

The book discusses best practices in implementation — explaining what, when, and how to crowdsource in a testing effort. It also includes case studies that illustrate how both product and service companies have successfully applied crowdsourcing in their testing programs.

Explaining how to use the combined advantages of crowdsourcing and cloud computing for software testing, the book examines various engagement models in which you could implement crowdsourced testing. It addresses effective defect management in crowdsourced testing and considers both the business and engineering aspects of crowdsourced testing.

The book explores the challenges, limitations, and situations when crowdsourced testing will not work and provides powerful best practices for mitigating the constraints and challenges, including how to build a crowdsourcing platform to test software products. Covering career opportunities for crowd testers, the book concludes by taking a look at the need to build a crowdsourced testing ecosystem, who the players of such an ecosystem would be, and who would need to champion such an effort.

This excerpt focuses on the term crowd, the history of both crowdsourcing in general and crowdsourcing in product development, and the traits of a crowd that make it relevant to be engaged at various stages in the software engineering process.

Excerpted with permission from the publisher, Auerbach Publications, from “Leveraging the Wisdom of the Crowd in Software Testing” by Mukesh Sharma and Rajini Padmanaban. Copyright © 2014.

The attached zip file includes:

• IntroPage.pdf
• TermsandConditions.pdf
• LeveragingWisdomCrowdSoftwareTesting.pdf