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PublicationHow to Systematically Conduct Crowdsourced Software Testing? Insights from an Action Research ProjectNowadays, traditional testing approaches become less feasible – both economically and practicably - for several reasons, such as an increasingly dynamic environment, shorter product lifecycles, cost pressure, as well as a fast growing and increasingly segmented hardware market. With the surge towards new modes of value creation, crowdsourced software testing (CST) seems to be a promising solution to effectively solve these problems and was already applied in various software testing contexts. However, literature so far mostly neglected the perspective of an organization intending to crowdsource tasks. In this study, we present an ongoing action research project with a consortium of six companies and present a preliminary model for crowdsourced software testing in organizations. The model unfolds necessary activities, process changes, and the accompanied roles for crowdsourced software testing to enable organizations to systematically conduct such initiatives and illustrates how test departments can use crowdsourcing as a new tool in their department.
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PublicationWhen is Crowdsourcing Advantageous? The Case of Crowdsourced Software Testing(Boğaziçi University, 2016)Crowdsourcing describes a novel mode of value creation in which organizations broadcast tasks that have been previously performed in-house to a large magnitude of Internet users that perform these tasks. Although the concept has gained maturity and has proven to be an alternative way of problem-solving, an organizational cost-benefit perspective has largely been neglected by existing research. More specifically, it remains unclear when crowdsourcing is advantageous in comparison to alternative governance structures such as in-house production. Drawing on crowdsourcing literature and transaction action cost theory, we present two case studies from the domain of crowdsourced software testing. We systematically analyze two organizations that applied crowdtesting to test a mobile application. As both organizations tested the application via crowdtesting and their traditional in-house testing, we are able to relate the effectiveness of crowdtesting and the associated costs to the effectiveness and costs of in-house testing. We find that crowdtesting is comparable in terms of testing quality and costs, but provides large advantages in terms of speed, heterogeneity of testers and user feedback as added value. We contribute to the crowdsourcing literature by providing first empirical evidence about the instances in which crowdsourcing is an advantageous way of problem solving.
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