Leveraging the Power of the Crowd for Software Testing

The rapid development of new IT-enabled business models, a fast-growing hardware market, and that market's segmentation are making software testing more complex. So, manual testing is becoming less applicable--economically and practicably. One approach to overcome these issues is crowdtesting--using crowdsourcing to perform testing. To profit from crowdtesting, companies can use three approaches: engage an external crowd of Internet users, engage their employees, or engage their customers. Three case studies illustrate these approaches' differences, benefits, and challenges, and the potential solutions to those challenges. Researchers' experiences with these approaches have led to guidelines that can help software development executives establish crowdtesting in their organizations. The Web Extra at extras.computer.org/extra/mso2017020062s1.pdf describes the procedure for the case studies. This article is part of a special issue on Crowdsourcing for Software Engineering.