Crowdsourcing: An Innovative Approach to Testing

In the perfect world, you would prefer to hire and develop a large number of the most qualified testers to work on your projects. However, when that’s impossible, crowdsourcing may be the answer. Crowdsourcing provides a mechanism for finding and using large numbers of qualified individuals to work on the task at hand. Spread across various disciplines—design, development, testing, and R&D—crowdsourced testing is the powerful combination of cloud economics with the effectiveness and efficiency of the crowd. More important than the touted economics of crowdsourcing is its ability to marshal an abundance of talent and resources to the world of testing. Clever approaches to testing can provide talented people and additional resources for completing complex testing tasks quickly. Learn how Ralph Decker took an impossible performance testing challenge to the crowd and created a test solution—without licensing, infrastructure, bandwidth, or personnel costs—that provided a performance test bed of hundreds of thousands of concurrent users.