QA testing has experienced a sea change over the past 20 years. What began as strictly in-house QA teams has evolved to add cost-effective and resource-efficient complements—offshoring and crowdtesting—to streamline or augment their current processes.
With any change or investment, you need to know (or have an idea of) the benefits to making that decision. This can be tricky depending on the industry and product, but the ROI of crowdtesting is clearer than you think.
Common Roadblocks to Releasing Successful Software
You don’t even have to go back 20 years to see how much things have changed when it comes to software development. At this point, things are changing daily—especially when it comes to the consumer—and that is putting significant strain on companies’ development teams.
Rising Customer Expectations Consumers in today’s digitally-driven world are relentless in their hunger for newer, shinier things. They want apps to be developed faster, add value at every step, and do so without any hiccups along the way. It’s not cheap or easy enough for your in-house QA team to realistically accomplish on their own.
Increasing Competition New apps and product features are released to the world every day, often multiple times a day. No one is going to wait for your software to catch up to the competition. If you fall behind, you may find users jumping ship for a competitor.
Balance of Speed, Quality, and Cost For your average QA team, the ability to release software in a quick, high-quality, and cost-efficient manner isn’t attainable. One of the three almost always has to give, inevitably leaving your QA team in a bind.
Lack of Adequate Testing Coverage Though you can probably count on one hand the number of mobile phones you see people use, there are actually 45,000 device/OS/network/location mobile device profiles in the world today. Covering all of those is virtually impossible and covering even a fraction of them is a challenge for your in-house team.
How Applause Clears Those Roadblocks and Delivers Measurable ROI
Solving all of the aforementioned issues is a tall task, but it’s possible with the addition of crowdtesting services. Hobson and Company cited three particular areas in which Applause’s crowdtesting services are delivering incredible value for their customers.
Reduce Testing Effort and Costs Code coverage is crucial to effectively rolling out a new app or feature. To get that level of coverage you can feel confident with, you need testers and devices at your disposal. Sourcing that all yourself is timely and costly, but with Applause you get all of that without the added overhead. According to Hobson’s report, Applause clients experienced a 150-200% increase in capacity of their internal testing teams while reducing lab costs by an average of 50-75%.
Innovate Faster with Lower Risk Quicker release cadences often come with a heightened risk of undetected bugs sneaking into the development environment. Whether it’s fatigue from your in-house team repeatedly testing the same cases or oversight from moving too quickly, these bugs can cause significant harm to your bottom line. With the additional capacity afforded by crowdtesting, clients are able to speed up their release cadence by 100-150% on average.
Improve User Experience The goal of every application is to bring in revenue. Without a strong and loyal customer base, this makes that goal unattainable. The more companies can deliver the app features and functionality their customers desire (at the speed they desire), the greater likelihood their customers will continue to come back and begin to attract others. Applause clients see a 10% increase in customer conversion rate (10% of which is attributable to Applause).
This is just a taste of the full ROI clients have experienced from working with Applause. Hobson’s entire report provides even more detailed insight into true ROI clients realize from Applause.
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