“Crowdsourced Quality Assurance & Code Coverage: No Longer Mutually Exclusive?”

  by Tomasz Pawłowski (The Qt Company)

Abstract

Crowdsourced QA is on the rise – and for good reason. Companies offering the service boast faster times to market, reduced testing costs, higher product quality, increased peace of mind, and better confidence during release. Disadvantages to this testing approach exist, too, like the lack of the testers’ code coverage information. Does this mean that black-box testing and code coverage are mutually exclusive? No.

We’ll explore four scenarios where crowdsourced QA is beneficial for a development team and where code coverage analysis coupled to it enhances the product quality. These scenarios are:

[1 – ] manual testers who are spread geographically
[2 – ] outsourced testing to a firm that uses a dedicated framework for, e.g., GUI testing
[3 – ] Beta-version testing coupled with profiling to determine which sections of the source code are most utilized
[4 – ] Security-conscious teams who are not permitted to share source code to the “crowd.”

We’ll examine each scenario using a commercial code coverage toolchain, and, through practical Qt application examples, we’ll demo application instrumentation, merging the crowd’s coverage reports, profiling, and more.

About Tomasz Pawłowski

Tomasz Pawłowski – Test Automation Consultant at The Qt Company, Tomasz started the adventure with Squish and GUI Testing in 2011, designing and implementing automated tests for a Flight Planning solution at Lufthansa Systems. In 2014 he joined froglogic and is conducting Squish training and consulting for many companies in Europe, India, and the USA. Additionally, Tomasz is implementing Squish integrations. Tomasz has a degree in computer science from Nicolaus Copernicus University in Poland.