Leveraging internal teams — such as employees, friends, families and contractors — to provide QA on a new or updated product sounds like a great idea — after all, who knows how to find issues with your product better than the people who know it best?
Well, it’s a great idea until you realize the headache that could come from managing this process effectively and at scale. It can be overwhelming for any organization to assemble and manage a variety of people that are not trained QA professionals. Even if you can assemble and manage the testers successfully, there are still the challenges of administering the testing and triaging feedback.
While this kind of ‘dogfooding’ (or ‘drink your own champagne’) testing program can have value and provide unique insights, it ultimately should only be a portion of your overall testing strategy. And if that small fraction is creating more overhead than other portions of a testing strategy, that’s a problem.
That is why Applause is providing a new offering called Bring Your Own Testers (BYOT). With BYOT, Applause’s fully managed service handles organizations’ internal testing in addition to testing performed by teams sourced from Applause’s global community of QA experts. Bring Your Own Testers leverages Applause’s established SaaS platform and well-honed processes that have been used by leading companies for over a decade. Results from internal testing and Applause’s curated testing teams are both available in the Applause Platform, and can be automatically exported to your bug tracking system. This eliminates the need for organizations to manage internal testing programs, and synthesizes all testing results to provide a more holistic view.
Let’s take a deeper look at how BYOT works and how it can help you.
What does Bring Your Own Testers mean?
For over a decade, Applause has built teams of vetted testers from its global community of trained QA professionals to meet organizations’ unique testing needs. Testers are matched to the specific demographics (location, device, skill set, etc.) that organizations covet in their testing, and Applause’s fully managed service manages the setup, test execution and delivery of triaged results using established processes. Issues can even be uploaded directly into an organization’s bug tracking system, helping development teams maintain a CI/CD workflow.
With Bring Your Own Testers, organizations get all the benefits of that managed service, but with their own group of pre-selected testers. Bring Your Own Testers enables an organization to take advantage of its internal teams that can provide valuable testing and user feedback, while eliminating the time and infrastructure that managing this process requires internally.
When an organization starts using BYOT, it will receive:
- A personalized onboarding experience for internal testers
- A branded testing platform experience for internal teams
- Applause’s fully managed solution delivery support for team setup, onboarding, test execution and delivery of results
- Fully triaged internal test results viewed in real time, with the ability to let internal QA teams triage results and/or automatically receive test results in their bug tracking system via Applause’s integration capabilities
- Access to the Applause Platform to view results
How can BYOT help your organization?
Engineering and QA teams are striving to test faster and more often, and want to increase development velocity while cutting down on cumbersome processes that will slow them down. BYOT represents a way for teams to achieve all of this, while also getting a more holistic view of their testing results.
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There are three main benefits of leveraging BYOT:
- Access to Applause’s fully managed service: BYOT enables organizations to engage with their internal teams in a way that may otherwise be impossible. Applause’s team manages the setup, execution and delivery of results.
- Expanded testing results and feedback: Organizations receive richer testing results and feedback by leveraging Applause’s global, expert community in addition to their internal teams. You can also take advantage of Applause’s ability to integrate with the top bug tracking systems so that issues can be assigned and addressed immediately.
- Seamless experience for your internal teams: Applause makes it easy for an organization’s internal teams to start testing and report actionable bugs and feedback. Teams are registered and onboarded through a simple, personalized branded experience so testing can begin quickly. Once testing has started, internal teams have real-time access to the Applause Platform to easily access builds, report issues containing all the necessary information, upload videos and provide valuable user feedback.
Applause remains committed to enabling organizations to benefit from quick and valuable testing results that they can view in real time, and ultimately creating a modern, holistic testing strategy. This is why Applause offers capabilities such as integrations with bug tracking systems and bug fix verification to speed up organizations’ testing efforts, and has rolled out new offerings such as the Applause Quality Score and Integrated Functional Testing to become more data driven and holistic. Bring Your Own Testers represents the next step in that journey.
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