What to Do—Develop Your Own Automation or Use Crowdsourced Testing?

Modern software products tend to have a rich UI that supports many user workflows, all of which need to be covered in testing. Agile organizations quickly discover that manual end-to-end testing neither supports their velocity nor provides respectable regression coverage. A common progression is to move from fully manual testing to record/replay, then to Selenium IDE style tests, then to automation based on Selenium WebDriver, perhaps with a BDD overlay. Daria Mehra has practiced this approach and shares her experience. She compares the Selenium style of automation to an alternative—crowdsourced test execution— which provides all the benefits of test automation, including continuous integration. This approach allows non-coders to express test cases in natural language, avoids the dependency on UI implementation, adds a “human eye” advantage, and provides the ability to massively parallelize tests for fast execution. Learn the pros and cons of end-to-end, UI-based test automation via Selenium compared to crowdsourcing. Find out how you can assess the suitability of these testing approaches for your needs.