Crowdsourcing and The Universe of DevOps

DevOps is revolutionary by all definitions. It is encouraging and empowering businesses to achieve all the client’s goals. The one-on-one relationship of DevOps with automation fulfills the needs of the modern-day dynamic and “continuous” needs of the IT world. There is no doubt that automation has taken over the ordinary tasks, however, there are a lot of extraordinary tasks which still need human intelligence.

When it comes to testing, there are a lot of small details which human eye can miss. Automation testing services can help in order to overcome these vulnerabilities. Despite all the depth which automation testing has to offer, it still lacks creativity and vision. That’s where crowdsourced testing enters the universe of DevOps and Agile. It is the perfect way to introduce creativity and vision in automated testing in real-life test environments. In this blog, you are going to find out about all the contributions which crowdsourced testing can make in DevOps and Agile workflow.

Here’s how crowdsourcing works in DevOps:

The Puzzle of Crowdsourcing in DevOps

The whole purpose of DevOps is to make the delivery process fast and efficient using Agile and other techniques. However, with crowdsourcing, a single CI/CD pipeline gets split to many crowd testers at the same time. Therefore, it can become extremely time-consuming because different testers have different approaches to solve the same problem. This is paradoxical to the whole methodology of co-existence of DevOps. Does this mean that crowdsourcing in DevOps is a bad idea? The answer is a big “NO”. This paradox of crowdsourcing is very easy to remove. Here’s how:

• Remove all the existing gaps between the testers through scheduled feedbacks at regular intervals
• Allow developers to integrate changes to complete the cycle within the set timeframe

All Hail Cloud

Cloud is the perfect solution to remove all the heavy infrastructure while maintaining a smooth and fruitful workflow. When it comes to crowdsourced testing, cloud is the answer to all the shortcomings. In fact, cloud adoption around the world is the major factor of the ever-increasing popularity of crowdsourced testing. Cloud-based platforms and data centers make it easy for crowd testers to share their inputs in DevOps operations. Hence, it makes change integrations and data management easier and faster. Thus, all the communication-related problems among the crowd testers can be solved just like that.

Remote Testers – Filling the Skill Gap

We can’t deny the sad reality that the rapid shift to DevOps has created a severe gap in the skill set of available resources. There are a lot of scenarios in both developmental and testing phases where specific skill sets or domain knowledge is required. However, organizations can solve this problem easily. All they have to do is to source the remote testers according to their needs and they will take care of the rest. Co-existence of a talent pool in DevOps is a sweet cherry on top if you want to ace the testing game of your automation testing company.

Is it Worth the Risk?

You can never be secure enough in modern day dynamics of IT environment. Technology is evolving at the fastest rate ever, hence, IoT is also proliferating and tech giants are presented with great security challenges every day. More advanced technologies are bringing more security challenges. In such challenging and hostile IT environments, crowdsourcing is equal to presenting security loopholes on a silver platter for the hackers. However, given all the benefits which crowdsourced testing has to offer, it is worth taking risks. It is because of all the great benefits of crowdsourcing that tech giants like Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, GitHub and many others are rolling out expensive and huge bug bounty programs.

Increased Operational Scalability

Crowdsourcing has the potential to equip the testing companies with the skills of varied talented testers. The best part about it is that you don’t need to actually hire them. It enables testing organizations to scale up teams and operations while reducing the time to market the product.

Maximum Utility of Diversity

Crowdsourced testing is an easy and cheap way to use cases for testing solutions. The geographical disparity of crowdsourced testers offers to test under different testing cases and scenarios. They can test software and applications under different real-time situations and judge the efficiency of the product under different conditions.

It All Boils Down To:

The bottom line of crowdsourcing testing is that despite all the shortcomings, it still has great potential to make DevOps operations even more successful and efficient. Since it has a lot to offer, why not give it a try?