If you’ve ever wished you could have dozens (or even hundreds) of targeted real-world people test your app or website to provide feedback or formal bug testing, crowdtesting might be your answer.
In plain language, crowdtesting (crowdsourced testing) relies on outsourcing the software testing process to a distributed group of testers. This is instrumental for gauging your product’s value and quality. Instead of relying only on post-launch customer feedback or testing from in-house QA team, you leverage a distributed group of independent testers often through an online platform, to catch bugs, usability issues, and other problems that your team might miss.
The core idea is to get real people on real devices to test your product in diverse real-world environments, so you can find out how it truly works in the wild before it reaches your customers.
Here’s what we will explore:
How does Crowdtesting Work?
Crowdtesting typically works through specialized platforms like BetaTesting that manage a community of testers. You start by defining what you want to test, for example, a new app feature, a website update, or a game across different devices. The platform then recruits remote testers that fit your target profile (e.g. demographics, device/OS, location). These testers use their own phones, tablets, and computers to run your application in their normal environment (at home, on various networks, etc.), rather than a controlled lab. Because testers are globally distributed, you get coverage across many device types, operating systems, and browsers automatically.
Importantly, crowdtesting is asynchronous and on-demand, testers can participate from different time zones and on their own schedules within your test timeframe. You might give them specific test scenarios (“perform these tasks and report any issues”) or allow exploratory testing where they try to “break” the app. Throughout the process, testers log their findings through the platform: they submit bug reports (often with screenshots or recordings), fill out surveys about usability, and answer any questions you have. Once the test cycle ends, you receive a consolidated report of bugs, feedback, and suggestions.
Because this all happens remotely, you can scale up testing quickly (e.g. bring in 50 or 100 testers on short notice) and even run 24-hour test cycles if needed. In fact, Microsoft leveraged a crowdsourcing approach with their Teams app to run continuous 24/7 testing; they could ramp up or down testing as needed, and a worldwide community of testers continuously provided feedback and documented defects, giving Microsoft much wider coverage across devices and OS versions than in-house testing alone.
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When is Crowdtesting a Good Solution?
One of the reasons crowdtesting has taken off is its flexibility. You can apply it to many different testing and user research needs. Some of the most common practical applications include:
Bug Discovery & QA at Scale: Perhaps the most popular use of crowdtesting is the classic bug hunt, unleashing a crowd of testers to find as many defects as possible. A diverse group will use your software in myriad ways, often discovering edge-case bugs that a small QA team might overlook. There’s really no substitute for testing with real users on their own devices to uncover those hard-to-catch issues.
Crowdtesters can quickly surface problems across different device models, OS versions, network conditions, etc., giving engineers a much richer list of bugs to fix. This approach is great for augmenting your internal QA, especially when you need extra hands (say before a big release) or want to test under real-world conditions that are tough to simulate in-house.
Usability & UX Testing: Want to know if real users find your app valuable, exciting, or intuitive? Crowdtesters can act as fresh eyes, navigating your product and giving candid feedback on what’s confusing or what they love. This helps product managers and UX designers identify pain points in the user journey early on. As the co-founder of Applause noted in an article by Harvard, getting feedback from people who mirror your actual customers is a major competitive advantage for improving user experience.
Internationalization & Localization: Planning to launch in multiple countries? Crowdtesting lets you test with people in different locales to check language translations, cultural fit, and regional usability. Testers from target countries can reveal if your content makes sense in their language and culture. This real-world localization testing often catches nuances that machine translation or in-house teams might miss, ensuring your product feels native in each market.
Beta Testing & Early Access: Crowdtesting is a natural fit for beta programs. You can invite a group of external beta testers (via a platform or your own community) to try pre-release versions of your product. These external users provide early feedback on new features and report bugs before a full public launch.
For example, many game and app companies run closed beta tests with crowdtesters to gather user impressions and make improvements (or even to generate buzz) prior to release. By testing with a larger user base in beta, you can validate that your product is ready for prime time and avoid nasty surprises on launch day.
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Real-World Examples of Crowdtesting
Crowdtesting isn’t just a theoretical concept. Many successful companies use crowdtesting to improve their products. Let’s look at two high-profile examples that product leaders can appreciate:
- Microsoft Teams: Microsoft needed to ensure its Teams collaboration app could be tested rapidly across many environments to match a fast development cycle. They partnered with Wipro and the Topcoder platform to run crowdsourced testing around the clock. This meant 24-hour test cycles each week with a global pool of testers, allowing Microsoft to release updates at high speed without sacrificing quality.
According to Topcoder, on-demand crowdtesting made it easy to scale up and down testing, and a worldwide community of testers continuously provided feedback and documented defects, helping Microsoft achieve much wider test coverage across devices and operating systems. In short, the crowd could test more combinations and find issues faster than the in-house team alone, keeping Teams robust despite a rapid release cadence. - TCL: the global leader in electronics manufacturing, partnered with BetaTesting to run an extensive in-home crowdtesting program aimed at identifying bugs, integration issues, and gathering real-world user experience feedback across diverse markets. Starting with a test in the United States, BetaTesting helped TCL recruit and screen over 100 qualified testers based on streaming habits and connected devices, including soundbars, gaming consoles, and cable boxes. Testers completed structured tasks over several weeks, such as unboxing, setup, multi-device testing, and advanced feature usage, while also submitting detailed bug reports, log files, and in-depth surveys. The successful U.S. test provided TCL with hundreds of insights, both technical and experiential which informed product refinements ahead of launch.
Building on this, TCL expanded testing into France, Italy, and additional U.S. cohorts, eventually scaling into Asia to validate functionality across hardware ecosystems and user behaviors worldwide. BetaTesting’s platform and managed services enabled seamless coordination across TCL’s internal teams, providing rigorous data collection and actionable insights that helped ensure a smooth global rollout of TCL’s new televisions.
Microsoft and TCL are far from alone. In recent years, crowdtesting has been embraced by companies of all sizes, from lean startups to tech giants like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Uber, and PayPal, to improve software quality. Whether it’s streaming services like Netflix using crowdtesters to ensure smooth playback in various network conditions, or banks leveraging crowdsourced testing to harden their mobile apps, the approach has proven effective across domains. The real-world impact is clear: better test coverage, more bugs caught, and often a faster path to a high-quality product.
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Final Thoughts
For product managers, user researchers, engineers, and entrepreneurs, crowdtesting offers a practical way to boost your testing capacity and get user-centric feedback without heavy overhead. It’s not about replacing your internal QA or beta program, but supercharging it. By bringing in an external crowd, you gain fresh eyes that can spot issues your team might be blind to (think weird device quirks or usability stumbling blocks). You also get the confidence that comes from testing in real-world scenarios, different locations, network conditions, usage patterns, which is hard to replicate with a small in-house team.
The best part is that crowd testing is on-demand. You can use it when you need a burst of testing (say before a big release or for quick international UX check) and scale back when you don’t. This flexibility in scaling, plus the diversity of feedback, ultimately helps you launch better products faster and with more confidence. In a fast-moving development world, crowdtesting has become an important tool to ensure quality and usability. As seen with companies like Microsoft and Airbnb, tapping into the crowd can uncover more bugs and insights, leading to smoother launches and happier users.
If you’re evaluating crowdtesting as a solution, consider your goals (bug finding, user feedback, device coverage, etc.) and choose a platform or approach that fits. Many have found that a well-managed crowdtest can be eye-opening, revealing the kinds of real-world issues and user perspectives that make the difference between a decent product and a great one. In summary, crowdtesting lets you leverage the power of the crowd to build products that are truly ready for the real world. And for any product decision-maker, that’s worth its weight in gold when it comes to delivering quality experiences to your users.
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