Crowd and Laboratory Testing, Can They Co-exist? An Exploratory Study

Crowd testing has gained a great attention in recent years, for its cost-effectiveness, impartiality, diversity, and high device and configuration coverage. Still, a number of challenges hamper its full success, such as lack of standards, limited information on critical features coverage, duplicate defect management, inappropriate reword mechanisms. Our intuition is that combining crowd testing with (a more traditional) laboratory testing, may compensate each other limitations. In order to explore how practitioners look at this possibility, we run a survey with crowd testers to understand their perception on this matter. Preliminary results are illustrated in this work.