The Journal of mHealth Vol 1 Issue 2 (Apr 2014) | Page 46

Quality Assurance in the Age of Mobile Healthcare
Continued from page 43

today’s exploding world of mobile devices and global user
landscape. But, the situation does not appear all that bleak
and highly effective solutions could be crafted by combining in-house and outsourced software testing activities with
crowd-sourced testing (‘crowdtesting’) approaches.

scenarios, loads and user paths, which cannot be replicated
by an internal testing team; many technical issues and bottlenecks, only come to light only when the product is tested “in
the wild”. Knowing how well an application performs under
real-world conditions in advance makes refactoring much easier and cheaper. Crowdtesting is also a quick and flexible way
of scaling up the number of test personnel, while simultaneously keeping the costs under control. Furthermore, crowdtesting is several times faster in identifying standard defects
than conventional testing as the following representation
demonstrates.
Crowd-sourced software testing is a recent innovation driven
by product and service innovations in mobile and cloud computing technologies. Software applications with a high Defect
Exposure Factor (DEF) i.e. criticality as a measure of immediate customer exposure, post release, are excellent candidates for crowdtesting. mHealth Apps are particularly suitable
for crowdtesting due to the dangers and risks they pose to the
lives or property of their users in case of device or software
failures.

Crowd testing has proven to detect a large number of bugs
and issues which passed internal QA, verification and validation as the real-world experiential case by Passbrains demonstrates.

Crowdtesting is a software testing methodology that leverages
a “community” of carefully curated external professional
software testers and App users with specific demographic
and health profiles, across the globe. Here, software testing is
carried out by a larger number of testers, from different locations rather than by a handful of local testing professionals.
Crowdtesting subjects the application under a set of realistic
Crowdtesting offers a particularly easy and scalable way to
engage all stakeholders in addressing the various considerations that are captured in such applications. For instance,
usability experts with specialised know-how in the healthcare
domain could be sought to propose various recommendations that facilitate adoption and usage. Similarly, healthcare
practitioners and legal experts could easily contribute insights
and consultation that help application developers meet the
technical, functional and compliance requirements.
Through c