Remote Testing: Making The Switch

In the current climate, nearly everything in our lives has gone remote. From our meetings and our day-to-day work to how we catch up with friends and family - we have never seen a time when the world was so exclusively online. 

In software development, the same applies.

QA teams, devs and engineers have been making the switch to working from home, forcing them to dramatically, and quickly, change the way they work together. Moreover, many companies are facing internal pressures to increase or maintain their product ROI, and protect their business in an uncertain future.

This, understandably, has put even more pressure on software development teams. 

On top of existing pressure to release quickly, lack of testing resources and an inability to increase test coverage due to time and budget constraints, teams are now faced with a multitude of new issues. As recruitment budgets freeze across the world, the opportunity to hire has been reduced, and the pressure is on for teams to work together remotely and deliver quality software.

That’s where remote testing comes in. 

Remote testing can speed up your release cycle, grow your QA team without hiring anyone new, and increase your testing capacity. 

And we’re here to tell you how...

What is remote testing?

Remote testing is what it says on the tin - testing, but remotely. But what does that mean exactly?

In manual remote testing, testers work from the safety of their home to test your product. These testers will have years of experience, and either work part-time or full time for crowdsourced testing companies. 

At Global App Testing, we have a crowd of 30,000+ professionally vetted remote testers in 105 countries across the globe. The crowd conducts functional, exploratory, UX and localization testing to ensure your product quality is high. Their aim is to catch critical bugs that could delay your release cycle or cause your team problems down the line.

But you can also test remotely using automation tools. For example, at Global App Testing, we use a blend of crowdsourced and automation testing to achieve greater test coverage (aka the holy grail of all engineering teams). This gives you all the benefits of remote manual testing with the speed of automation when it is required.

With our test case execution, you can achieve results in under 2.5 hours, remotely from your own home. This will increase your release velocity and help you find critical bugs - fast.

What can you do with remote testing?

Let’s say your manual in-house QA team is struggling to keep up with releases. Maybe you have faced a headcount freeze and you simply do not have time to dedicate to increasing testing capacity. Your team are in disaster mode as you try and keep up with the stress.

What can you do?

With remote testing, you can test any digital product or software entirely remotely without having to hire another member of your team. And you can do it fast.

By pairing with a company like Global App Testing, you have access to a crowd of remote testers who are on hand to test your product 24/7. That means that you can send off your tests after code freeze on a Friday, and have your results ready to go on Monday morning. This instantly relieves pressure from your development team while you sleep.

With remote testing, you also have access to larger device coverage you may not have in-house. If you have a small testing team who are working remotely, sending them new devices or using the testing devices they have access to currently will not be a time-efficient or exhaustive option. 

By using a remote testing platform instead, you gain access to professional testers with hundreds of devices combinations. This means wide-ranging device coverage across the world at your fingertips. How else can you extend test coverage this easily?

You can also have the ability to test at all stages in your development cycle. The ability to test continuously with this extra testing capacity will mean that you can catch critical bugs earlier in the process. This is especially important when saving costs. Research by Capers Jones found that the cost to address bugs post-release is $16,000, but a bug found at the design phase costs $25. This means that by testing early and often, you can save time and money. 

Graph from Capers Jones, American software engineer and author of the book Applied Software Management: Global Analysis of Productivity and Quality.

The benefits of remote testing

• Saving time: with remote testing, you can have access to testers 24/7, and receive test results fast. This means no waiting around for test results and a streamlined development process. With Global App Testing, you can send off your app for remote exploratory testing and receive results in under 44 hours. That’s just not possible any other way.

• Saving cost: the average salary for a QA automation engineer is $70,892. That’s a large chunk of the budget going towards extra testing capacity. By partnering with a company that provides remote testers, you can avoid heavy costs associated with recruitment and start testing almost immediately. Sometimes you don’t have the budget for extra headcount but you do for solution providers. That’s the beauty of remote testing: elastic scalability at your fingertips.
• No need to recruit: Let’s say you want to release to a new market abroad. Hiring a testing team in another country takes out a lot of your precious time. And, in the current climate, the recruitment budget may be frozen for the foreseeable future. With pressure to release to new markets fast, this is a daunting task that no Head of QA or VP of Engineering wants to contend with. By partnering with a company that provides remote testers globally, like Global App Testing, you have access to a crowd of testers across the globe without a recruitment headache. 

• Localization: Professional remote testers work in countries across the globe to find the critical bugs that could impact your customers. This means that they can verify local challenges, specific wording, and cultural norms to make sure you feel confident to release to new markets. By providing local insights, and ensuring your product works on networks and device combinations you may not have used before, remote localization testing will improve quality and help you discover critical bugs.

Making the switch

It's not as hard as you may think to make the switch. 

Working with Global App Testing doesn’t mean a complete overhaul of your current QA process either. 

To be clear, Global App Testing isn’t a replacement for your in-house team - we know they work extremely hard to deliver quality. In fact, at Global App Testing, we elevate your current QA process by providing:

• On-hand support: as well as a customer success team on-hand for strategic input and advice, we also provide you with moderated bug reports from our remote moderation team. You only get the bugs and issues that matter the most.
• Continuous improvement: we help provide continuous improvement with strategy planning and sharing best practices.

• Impact first remote testing: remote testing in the same environments as your users - we can help you test in 105 countries on thousands of real devices, OS versions and network. So you can find critical bugs - fast.

Book a call with one of our QA experts today for a free consultation.