The Journal of mHealth Vol 1 Issue 2 (Apr 2014) | Page 47

Quality Assurance in the Age of Mobile Healthcare

healthcare applications to a specific subset of testers and
gather their views and opinions on the fitness for purpose
(utility) and use (warranty) considerations. Expert software
testers conduct a battery of tests under the most unforgiving of situations and device configurations to ensure that the
application works correctly, requires the absolutely minimal
system requirements, and is resilient to user errors, etc. Business and Process integrators could critically evaluate the adequacy of functions and processes for mission critical applications that deal with emergency situations.

Through a mix of in-house, outsourced and crowd-sourced
testing, several best practices could be properly combined to
maximise efficiency in terms of both, resources and costs. Inhouse staff and outsourced teams deliver value by focusing
on technological, regulatory and business challenges requiring
immediate attention due to its proximity to the development
team. Crowdtesting team’s laser focus, single-minded efforts,
inherent motivation and scalability deliver tremendous value
by detecting further issues before the software is released.
The crowd’s knowledge is diffused among its tester base, but
the collective testing knowledge base is larger than that within
any company. Given the complexities of the modern IT landscape, an optimum testing scenario should include elements
of in-house, outsourced and crowd-sourced testing teams in
the right proportion.

mHEALTH AND CROWDTESTING

CHOOSING A SOFTWARE TESTING
SERVICE PROVIDER

Despite the various models at a company’s disposal, crowdtesting demands some special attention, especially in the mHealth
context. Given the complex nature of mHealth Apps and the
need to include as many stakeholders as possible to articulate
a coherent mHealth adoption strategy, crowdtesting offers a
particularly easy and scalable way to engage all stakeholders
capturing their expectations from mHealth applications. The
following graphic represents how crowdtesting could help
mHealth companies at various stages of their software development life-cycle (SDLC):

Choosing the right software testing service provider is by and
far one of the most important decisions for companies developing mHealth Apps. It is mandatory that the company performs extensive due diligence and evaluate service providers’
offerings, client base, capabilities, resources scalability, and in
case of crowdtesting service providers, the community size,
skill-sets and expertise, demographics, and device configurations coverage, as well as their crowdtesting platform technology and processes.

Similarly, healthcare practitioners and legal experts could easily contribute insights and consultation that help application
developers meet the technical, functional and compliance
requirements. As previously discussed through crowdtesting,
it is also possible to target mHealth applications to a specific
subset of testers and gather their views and opinions on the
fitness for purpose (utility) and use (warranty) considerations.

In general, selecting a proven and experienced software testing vendor with crowdtesting offerings makes the operational
activities much easier, as there is usually less maintenance
and governance required during the strategy development
and execution stages because the service provider has already
addressed many of the relevant aspects of engagement from
Continued on page 46

45
The Journal of mHealth