Testing Applications for the Real World:

Can the Crowd Deliver “Better, Faster, Cheaper” Testing for a Software-Driven World?

Presenters: Crowdsourcing.org, PASS Group

Session Overview
We live in a digital world where everything from content to commerce has moved online and applications are the lifeblood of many businesses wishing to reach the mass market through the latest media. The need for secure, user friendly multi-channel environments is driving next generation Information Technology (IT) solutions. Crowdtesting is the new way of testing and releasing applications offering quality, speed and price advantages over traditional software testing methods that fail to deliver business and customer demands for multiple and frequent releases of applications.

Learning Points:

• Why Crowdtesting is Increasingly Becoming a Necessity, with the Evolving Trends in IT Industry
• The Solutions that Focus on Big Data, Pattern and Analytics; More Open-Source; Cloud-Based Infrastructure; and Platform Independent Applications
• How Enterprise Crowdtesting Model allows Global Organizations to Leverage Crowdsourced Software Testing
• How Using a Geographically and Culturally Disparate Cloud is a Better Way to Test

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An increasing number of today’s consumers are often described as «digital natives,» a highly tech-savvy bunch armed with gadgets who are not only connected to the cloud at all times – many of them live much of their lives there. This generation wants to decide which channel to use for doing any kind of business interaction and expect the provider to adapt accordingly in terms of service quality, security and ease of use. They expect quick adaptability to their changing needs, and have little sense of brand loyalty due to the plethora of available options at hand. Continue reading…

WOBURN, MA–(Marketwire – Jan 30, 2013) - See also on Yahoo Finance

PASS Group (www.pass.ch), a leading crowdsource software testing services provider, has launched its comprehensive crowdtesting solution passbrains to the U.S. market to meet the increasing demand for consumer-centric, professional & high-quality, software testing services delivered at low-cost. PASS’ announcement comes on the heels of a successful launch in Europe in 2011 against a backdrop of the projected growth of the $50 billion quality assurance and software testing market. The revenue growth of crowdsourcing service providers has been staggering, jumping 75 percent in 2011, according to a report by massolution, a leading crowdsourcing and crowdfunding advisory firm.

Crowdtesting is a new disruptive technology being deployed by the world’s leading companies as traditional IT and business models shift to embrace the “crowd.” Enterprise level companies like eBay are curating their own crowds by utilizing an existing customer base and passbrains multinational army of currently 20,000 users and 2,000 highly skilled software testers in over 60 countries. Enterprise customers can use the passbrains.com platform not just in the form of a managed on-demand service, but also in self-service mode with their hybrid or private crowd.

“Our unique service model ensures best product quality while reducing testing costs and time to market for our clients,” said Dieter Speidel, President and CEO of the PASS Group. “We achieve this through massive scaling of the number of external testers assigned during product development to test applications under real-world conditions.”

Carl Esposti, CEO and Founder of massolution and Crowdsourcing.org confirmed that their research shows that “large and small companies alike are doing everything they can to maximize the end-customer experience, which today is as likely to occur at the end of an application versus a phone call or in-person. Crowdtesting provides the answer for those enterprises looking to lead or that are struggling to keep up.”

While passbrains is best known for providing enterprise level crowdtesting solutions and a highly qualified “crowd” of professional application testers, it is now further expanded to offer an entire suite of real-time Testing Workforce Management solutions to large enterprises including recruiting, crowd consulting and knowledge networking through global experts. Uniquely, passbrains also allows customers direct access to its technology and methodologies as more enterprises are seeking solutions to integrate public and private crowdtesting approaches.

(Link: http://advertisers.crowdsourcing.org/passbrains) A November white paper, “Testing Applications for the Real World,” by massolution, which was sponsored by PASS Group, outlines the impact of crowdtesting and how companies are realizing savings of up to 50 percent over previous software development processes.

“The wide availability of software testing professionals offering their services through a virtual Internet-based infrastructure and the rise of cloud computing make crowdtesting a natural extension of the crowdsourcing phenomenon,” said Speidel. ”Developers desperately need to test software under real-world conditions in order to work out bugs and defects in a matter days or weeks, not months, especially where different languages, browsers and platforms are all variables in software and app localization. Our successes in Europe and the projected growth of the U.S. software testing market enable us to hit the ground running.”

“Managed crowdtesting is an excellent tool to further extend our quality assurance strategy by adding test resources with the most heterogeneous skill profiles, professional backgrounds, and cultural user behavior,” said Michael Palotas, head of Quality Engineering Europe at eBay. “Crowd testers think and work in different ways than internal testers; this is why crowdtesting can still find bugs which haven’t been detected through traditional software testing methods.”

Passbrains crowd testers are thoroughly vetted, and clients work with a team of PASS’ professional in-house project managers to streamline the entire process. “The data in our white paper confirms that as more testers are added to a project, the number of uncovered defects increases substantially. Identifying more problems in the testing phase with crowdtesting can have a hugely positive impact on a company’s reputation and provide significant cost savings and damage avoidance by early detection of critical issues,” added Speidel.

The PASS Group and massolution will be holding further conversations on crowdsourced application testing on www.crowdsourcing.org.

To learn more about crowdsourcing and crowdtesting, read our new whitepaper.

About PASS Group

Building on long-term success in quality engineering and process excellence, PASS Group is a Swiss headquartered global IT and professional services provider with over two decades of experience in providing applications development and professional testing services. We help our customers, from small, high-growth start-up’s to Global 1000 companies, embrace “the crowd” through our passbrains platform and crowdsourced testing services as a way to close the speed versus quality gap in in a digital world where applications require more support, and testing, than ever before.

For more information, please visit www.passbrains.com and www.pass.ch

About massolution

Massolution is a unique research and advisory firm specializing in the crowdsourcing and crowdfunding industry. Massolution works with leading organizations to deliver crowdsourcing and crowdfunding business models that access an on-demand, scalable workforce to deliver improved business performance and to drive product and service innovation and enhanced levels of customer engagement. Our team has experience working in large enterprise environments designing, implementing, and managing crowdsourcing initiatives. Massolution also operates the industry website Crowdsourcing.org.

passbrains was launched as a crowdsourced software testing solution by the PASS Group, less than a year ago, in January 2012. And as Mayank Mittal, who works in international business development and strategic management for PASS recently told me, in its first nine months passbrains built up a base of around 10,000 users and over two thousand professional testers spread around sixty countries. Within a year, the company has also expanded the platform to include recruitment and crowd consulting services. Now PASS is expanding passbrains to serve large enterprises, providing them a comprehensive and real time workforce management solution.

First, here's how Mittal described the passbrains crowdsource testing offerings:

"We are doing a lot of software validations for compatibility, functionality, performance, etc… and usability validations where we allow our test users to come back with feedback or proposed enhancements on application features, and we take it back to the application owners and software developers. This is one of the cool features of crowd testing, because in-house testing never gives access to real time users, so crowd testing enables companies to ensure that major usability issues get discovered before the release."

In addition, passbrains also provides content validation, language and localization testing and checking of search results, among other related services.

A new feature that has naturally evolved with its expanding tester base is recruitment services. Passbrains' platform does performance ratings and competency profiling for testers, which helps in project mapping, on-boarding, and payment modeling, and Mittal says this information is now beginning to be used by companies for recruiting freelancers for continuous engagements through passbrains.

"(The service can be used by customers) to recruit from the portal – testers who have a proven skill set, who have performed well, who have worked on similar products – maybe as a contractor or as a full time employee. This also motivates the crowd team to actually be more focused and have more incentive to perform beyond the normal money that they get."

Another interesting feature in passbrains is something called Crowd Consult, which Mittal described this way:

"Crowd Consult facilitates real-time knowledge networking by utilizing the crowd expertise, so when people post a question, task or problem it gets assigned to identified subject matter experts in the crowd community, and we get a response, a professional response — not just like a Google response — within hours."

In the process, Crowd Consult also rates the experts based on their response quality for future reference, further streamlining the whole question and answer process. Once identified, subject matter experts can further continue supporting the user through Crowd Consult. Users tend to continue using these experts, who can be later contacted directly by the users, according to Mittal:

"this real time know-how networking approach is revolutionary in the way it connects talent and provides the power of thousands of brains to solve a problem."

But passbrains has designs on more than just improving application quality and knowledge management. It's looking to provide a comprehensive workforce management solution to large organizations by developing a private crowd community for their employees. Mittal says that would address one major problem for many enterprises:

"At present large enterprises have multiple platforms available — one for managing workforce, another one for managing projects and bench, and another for innovation. There’s a knowledge management portal, there’s a social networking forum, there’s a portal for question and answer sessions, another for product development, and for management reporting.

There are diverse platforms, and these platforms don’t talk to each other. There’s no connectivity or synchronicity. There’s no network there. It's very difficult for a new employee to find the right forum and reach out to the right contact, it's very difficult for management to track the employees across platforms, it's very difficult for projects to identify resources with appropriate skills, and it's challenging to manage performance in such a dynamic environment."

Mittal says that passbrains will solve this problem by providing a real time platform for resource management, resulting in better workforce collaboration, employee motivation and organizational communication. He adds that the organization using the new platform will have easy access to real time information on employee competency, availability, performance and subject expertise, improving bench management, expediting resource identification and on-boarding for projects while improving utilization.

"Real-time knowledge networking will expedite problem solving by facilitating global access to experts and also support collaborative innovation, product development & solution design. Employees will have access and visibility across the organization globally. Performance management can be more effective with traceability across multiple initiatives."

PASS is in discussions with large global organizations with tens of thousands of IT employees about the potential for implementing and customizing the platform for their workforce management. Mittal adds that the Crowd Consult feature has already been successfully implemented at a large Swiss bank for a group involving around 3,000 users and could soon be expanded for use across the entire organization.

Mayank Mittal

In line with our current global expansion, we welcome our new joinee Mr. Mayank Mittal, who will be taking over the responsibility of International Business Development and Strategic Management for the entire PASS Group, based out of Bangalore, India.

Mayank joins us from Cognizant Technology Solutions, Switzerland, a US based IT Service Provider and a Fortune 500 company. At Cognizant, he was the core member of European leadership team for their Testing Practice (20’000+ employees). He was responsible for expanding their footprints in Europe and played an anchor role in establishing the practice for Switzerland region. During his tenure, he created one of the largest testing engagements for Cognizant, establishing a 5 year long partnership with a large financial enterprise, earning $25 Million annual revenue with a 120+ global delivery team spread across 5 geographies. He also built the leadership team for Switzerland Testing, integrated the local Country Head and devised expansion strategies for the region.

Mayank is a Strategic Business Leader with international experience in the Software Testing Industry covering senior responsibilities in Business Development, Management Consulting and Delivery Management. He has over 10 years experience of working with large enterprises across Continental Europe, U.K. and Asia regions.

Mayank Mittal has enabled multiple global enterprises in building a mature and efficient Software Testing organization. He specializes in setting up large scale Managed Test Centers; implementing Factory Model; creating specialized units such as Test Automation, Data Management and Vendor Pools; enabling global delivery models through onsite, offshore and nearshore; leading transformation programs to consolidate and standardize testing.

Mayank has provided management consulting to IT Heads & their leadership teams, to help them in strategic alignment, creating value proposition and guiding them in developing a Testing Organization from conception to steady state phase. He has also helped organizations in assessing their Test Maturity, Offshorability Potential, Rationalization Potential & Operational Efficiency and suggested areas of improvement.

Prior to Cognizant, Mayank did his MBA in Finance and Marketing from Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad, one of the premier management institutes in India (ranked #20 in the world as per 2012 Financial Times ranking), associated with Wharton Business School U.S. & London Business School U.K.

Before his MBA, Mayank worked as a consultant, first with Oracle financial services solutions (erstwhile i-flex solutions), at India and later with Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), at India & U.K.  During his tenure, he worked across multiple consulting assignments for global enterprises in banking and insurance sectors.

Mayank also holds a Bachelor in Technology (B-Tech) degree from IIT-BHU Varanasi, India.

PASS Technologies and Greenliff have stepped into a strategic partnership to extend their portfolio of QA and testing services. Since many years, both companies have been specialising in software quality assurance and application testing. The partnership enables both companies to focus their expertise from different domains and disciplines and thereby to broaden their customer base. While Greenliff benefits by having access to PASS’ crowdtesting platform passbrains.com, PASS enlarges their portfolio through Greenliff’s Know-how in automated testing of mobile apps and development of test software.

PASS Technologies und Greenliff sind eine strategische Partnerschaft eingegangen, um bestehenden und neuen Kunden eine erweiterte Palette von Testdienstleistungen anbieten zu können. Beide Firmen sind seit vielen Jahren Spezialisten rund um die Sicherstellung von Software-Qualität und das Testen von Software-Lösungen. Ziel der Partnerschaft ist es, die unterschiedliche Expertise hinsichtlich Branchen-Fokus und Dienstleistungsportfolio zu bündeln und einem breiteren Kundenkreis zugänglich zu machen. Während Greenliff durch die Partnerschaft Zugang zur Crowdtesting-Plattform passbrains.com erhält, kann PASS dank Greenliffs Know-how sein Angebot rund um das automatisierte Testen von mobilen Apps und der Entwicklung von Testsoftware ausbauen.

We are happy to announce that PASS received Dun & Bradstreets Top Rating Certificate.

The D&B Rating Certificate is the quality certification mark for commerce and stands for both reliability and stability. Only two percent of Swiss companies meet the conditions for the D&B Rating Certificate. This commendation authenticates PASS as a trustworthy and attractive business partner, exhibiting a stable business situation and very good payment behaviour. It highlights our ability to honour our business commitments towards our customers and suppliers.

When you have a built-in customer base as huge as eBay’s, you’ve got a built-in crowd that can help you test out new features, which is exactly what the ecommerce titan does via a section of its site called “Garden.“

Turning your customers into a de facto focus group is one thing, but turning to the crowd for more serious functionality and usability testing is quite another. That simple fact led eBay Europe to extend their software quality engineering program by adding crowd testing through passbrains.com. The Switzerland-based company is part of the PASS Group, which operates offshore sites in India, South America and Eastern Europe, managing crowd testing projects with testers from more than 60 countries.

eBay says using a geographically and culturally disparate cloud is a better way to test.

“Managed Crowd Testing is an excellent tool to further extend our quality assurance strategy by adding test resources with the most heterogenous skill profiles, professional backgrounds and cultural user behavior,” says Michael Palotas, Head of Quality Engineering Europe at eBay. “Crowd testers think and work in different ways than internal testers, this is why crowd testing can still find bugs which haven’t been detected through traditional software testing methods.”

passbrains runs exploratory functional & usability tests for multiple national eBay sites. Hundreds of professional software testers are screened for qualifications and become registered members of passbrains.com. The testers working on eBay’s sites continuously hunt for bugs and usability flaws on the online auction platform, which is frequently updated with new features and functionalities.

“The number of testers joining the eBay project is constantly growing and the project generates even more value than we originally expected,” says Dieter Speidel, CEO of PASS Technologies. “Through passbrains.com, eBay is able to leverage their external test capacities significantly and to further improve product quality. Many critical bugs occur under random conditions and in most exotic use cases, that’s why the crowd should be involved before software products are released.”

Speidel says passbrains is continuing to reach out further internationally to additional regions to help ensure that more of those random conditions and exotic cases will be covered by its crowd.