Mobile devices compatibility testing strategy via crowdsourcing

Purpose - This paper aims to support small mobile application development teams or companies performing testing on a large variety of operating systems versions and mobile devices to ensure their seamless working.

Design/Methodology/Approach - This paper proposes a Hybrid Crowdsourcing method that leverages the power of public crowd testers. This leads to generating a novel crowdtesting workflow DT-CT that focuses on developers and crowd testers as key elements in the testing process without the need for intermediate as managers or lead- ers. This workflow has been used on a novel crowdtesting platform (AskCrowd2Test). This platform enables testing the compatibility of mobile devices and applications at two different levels, High-level (device characteristics) or Low-level (code). Additionally, a Crowd-Powered Knowledge Base (CPKB) has been developed that stores testing re- sults, relevant issues, and their solutions.

Findings - The comparison of the presented DT-CT workflow with the common and most recent crowdtesting workflows showed that DT-CT may positively impact the test- ing process by reducing time-consumption and budget spend due to the direct interaction of developers and crowd testers.

Originality/value - To the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to propose crowdtesting workflow based on developers and public crowd testers without crowd man- agers or leaders, which light the beacon for future research in this field. Additionally, this work is the first that authorizes crowd testers with a limited level of experience to participate in the testing process, which helps in studying the behaviors and interaction of end-users with apps and obtain more concrete results.