How to manage Crowd Testing and Crowdsourcing? Addressing Major Managerial Problems

Crowd Testing is a new paradigm in the quality driven space of software testing. There are a number of predictions and pros stating that this type of testing might become immensely popular and would be able to acquire a profitable market share in the software testing industry. On the contrary it is yet to be seen any significant success stories or deliveries achieved via this innovative branch of crowdsourcing industry. Without denying the fact that this area of software testing is still in its so called adoption oriented infancy rather it has grown significantly based upon its technology/infrastructure driven maturity level, yet we have to keep a keen eye on the expanse or demise of the same.

Whenever a new technology comes in everybody starts to talk about its advantages and benefits it bring along. But as I am closely related to this field I felt to do otherwise I would like to point out more cons or problems that we need to manage or deal with, so that Crowd Testing succeeds and can truly stay put on the variety of beneficial claims laid down by its pioneers. 

The major managerial problem this crowd testing brings can be summed into these categories: 

1. Proper Dissemination of Testing Requirements into the Crowdsourced Team of Testers
2. Skill identified or Experience based Work Allocation
3. Concrete Business Clarifications Mechanism
4. Reduction of crowdsourced resources based liability risks and mitigation plan
5. Irrefutable Wages Delivery Mechanism
6. Enabling of testing technologies for mobile, business intelligence, VPN etc on crowd testing environments
7. Business Confidentiality & Security Aspect Justification for Cloud and Crowd based software testing model
8. Defects Validation Mechanism 
9. Synchronization Mechanism of crowdsourced testers' (globally located) work for Test Reporting (For periods when defects are scarce)
10. Crowdsourced Resource Retention
11. Idiosyncrasy of Deployment Schedules & Stringent Timelines
12. Ground level binding of Crowdsourced Testers with country specific legal contracts.

The above stated managerial problems presents a challenge to Crowdsourced Testing or Crowd Testing firms/organizations. There might be several scenarios where Crowd Testing companies will try to take these challenges one by one and address them by their own business model or implementation methodologies. Rather the one who can get rid of them all will stand out to be a winner. In my following blog I will suggest my own strategies to deal with these. So till then I invite all like minded and fellow professionals to find a way out and leverage the pros and diminish the cons to give a profitable business solution out of Crowd Testing and Crowdsourcing.