Applause is the largest marketplace for software testing on the web. On this platform more than 100000 testers allow companies to launch their high quality applications. Thousand of companies choose Applause as partner for their quality assurance processes and among those firms we find start-ups but also Fortune 500 companies such as Google and Microsoft.

Start-ups choose Applause for its cost, since it provides an on-demand pricing system that allow companies to buy exclusively the services they want and not what they don’t need. They choose it for its quality, since companies can always check the characteristics of each tester and they can match their applications with their services ( for instance, they can restrict testing to only one category or they can ensure the quality of their products through different  systems). They choose it for the easiness to communicate – in the shortest time possible – and the control day-to-day that would not be otherwise possibleon the testing process.

Big companies trust Applause as a partner because Applause has invented the idea of in-the-wild testing as opposed to lab testing. Companies create their software and applications and they work perfectly as long as they are tested in the lab.Applause ensures that an application is not only able to work perfectly in a lab but also in a real world environment. Its motto is “Are your apps ready for what lies beyond the firewall?” and relies on the assumptions that in the real world imperfect connectivity, outdated software and unique hardware actually exist. The collective intelligence that Applause provides is the answer to these problems. The crowd is as important as labs, since they can test on adverse environments and provide means for reliable, secure and intuitive apps. Crowd’s advantage lies in diversity – in fact only in this way companies can be sure that that applications work all over the world – and also in availability so that companies can test as much as they can during peak periods and instead trying to reduce costs in others. The quality applications developed by Google, Microsoft, and many other would not be possible without the flexibility of a community of testers that act as a complement of the in-house development.

To conclude, Applause is still defining its business model and introducing new features based on the idea of  developing the expertise  of the crowd. In fact, it has recently launched two programs: Sandbox – in which top testers review quality of testing of new members –  and Crash Courses whose aim is to train new members in order to increase the overall quality of the services provided by the crowd. These initiatives will contribute to further development of the community.

Sources:

• http://applause.com/
• Brabham, D. C. (2008). Crowdsourcingas a model for problemsolving an introduction and cases. Convergence: the international journal of researchinto new media technologies, 14(1), 75-90.
• Malone, T. W., Laubacher, R., and Dellarocas, C. N. (2010) The collective intelligence genome, MIT Sloan Management Review, Spring, 51, 3, 21-31