In response to shrinking budgets and tight launch deadlines, crowdsourced software testing is a growing trend. Here are six ways an on-demand testing team can complement your in-house QA efforts.
 

Scrum frameworks deliver working code in time-boxed sprints. Many communities find Scrum to be a wonderful balance between discipline and agility because it tames turbulence and focuses teams. However, Scrum requires dramatic rethinking of the traditional role of testing in a development project. Rob Sabourin explores critical testing incidents in Scrum projects-key turning points, difficult decisions, major problems, brilliant successes, and dismal failures. Rob identifies key skills, practices, and techniques used to confidently deliver working code each sprint. Rob shows how testing is implemented by teams in different organizational, business, and technical contexts. His findings raise important questions and identify some novel solutions. Do we really need testers in Scrum? Learn how teams solve tough security, performance, reliability, scalability, usability and regression testing challenges.

Continuous testing is a practice that involves automatically running tests after every program change. Just as modern IDEs provide instant feedback about the code's syntactic correctness, continuous testing gives you instant feedback about the semantic correctness of the code. Continuous testing has a profound impact on the way you use test-driven development (TDD) and continuous integration (CI). TDD provides rapid feedback through the frequent execution of a small set of related tests. CI provides broader feedback on a less frequent basis. Continuous testing combines the immediacy of TDD with the breadth of CI to redefine the experience of developer testing. Rod Coffin describes the history, theory, practice, and daily application of continuous testing, including its application on different platforms, and his ongoing experiences with continuous testing on real-world systems.

In agile development, software defects are everyone's responsibility. One tenet of agile is that defects should be fixed "as soon as possible" rather than documented as an inventory of "stuff" that doesn't work yet. Janet Gregory examines the sometimes vexing question agile teams have for dealing with a defect-should we "fix it now and forget it," "fix it now and track it," or "record and track it?" She explores why, regardless of which choice is made, you should write a test case to verify the fix is correct. Find out how those test cases can become a valuable record about defect history. Learn ways to track defects in a simple system to help the agile team discover process problems and potential improvement opportunities. By dealing with defects effectively, your team will be able to shift its focus from defect repair toward defect prevention.