Top Challenges Faced While Hiring Beta Testers

Nowadays, each software application needs to deliver optimal user experience to remain popular, relevant, and profitable over a longer period of time. Many enterprises nowadays opt for beta testing to assess the user experience delivered by their software in real environment. As a form of external acceptance testing, beta testing helps businesses to get their applications testes by real users in real-time environments. Hence, the business has to make the software available to limited and selected end-users for evaluation and validation.

The feedback and suggestion provided by the beta testers help the business to eliminate software failure risks and enhance the software’s user experience. An enterprise can accelerate the external acceptance testing process using an array of beta testing tools. But it also needs to select the right beta testers to accelerate custom validation and obtain more relevant feedback. At the same time, the enterprise also needs to address a number of challenges associated with beta tester recruitment.

Identifying Top 5 Challenges in Recruiting Beta Testers

1) Reflecting the Target Market

While developing a software application, an enterprise always target specific markets and user groups. The business must keep in mind the targeted market and users to recruit the right beta testers. For instance, the enterprise must recruit bankers and financial consultants to evaluate a financial software application effectively. While recruiting beta testers, the business must keep in mind the target market. It needs to send invitation to beta testers from the targeted market or industry. Also, it must shortlist the prospective beta testers according to the target market to receive more relevant feedback.

2) Identifying Serious and Unbiased Beta Testers

An enterprise can assess the quality of its application more effectively by involving real users in the software testing process. But the enterprise needs to ensure that the application is being tested by the relevant users. It can always reach out to prospective beta testers by using social networking platforms or creating a landing page. The business still needs to identify the right beta testers to get accurate and unbiased feedback and suggestions. Hence, enterprises must ask many questions to the prospective beta testers, and shortlist the candidates who are serious and interested.

3) Increasing Participation Levels

A large percentage of beta testers often do not provide any relevant and meaningful feedback. While recruiting beta testers, the enterprises must explore ways to increase the participation level. They can always persuade testers to test the software thoroughly to provide relevant feedback. The enterprises can even consider incentivizing the prospective beta testers to increase participation levels. The incentive will motivate the testers to evaluate the application under varying conditions and provide meaningful feedback.

4)  Making Them Provide Relevant Feedback

Normally, beta testing of a software application is performed by multiple testers. Each tester can evaluate the quality of the software based on a number of parameters including functionality, usability, performance and security. Hence, the feedback received from multiple beta testers may appear ambiguous and complex. The enterprise must ask the beta testers to provide the feedback and information that can be used to improve the quality of the software. While recruiting beta testers, it must explore ways to persuade them to use the application under varying conditions to provide more relevant feedback.

5) Keeping Track of Individual Testers

Most enterprises do not perform beta Mobile Apps Testing based on a comprehensive plan. Hence, they often find it difficult to monitor the activities of individual beta testers. A business must monitor the activities of each beta testers to ensure higher level of participation. Also, the monitoring will help the enterprise to keep the feedback up-to-date. The business can even send messages to specific testers to accelerate the beta testing process. At the same time, the monitoring will help individual beta testers to meet predefined beta testing objectives and provide timely feedback.

On the whole, the recruitment of beta testers will have a direct impact on the entire external acceptance testing process. An enterprise must require the prospective beta testers to answer a variety of questions. The survey will help the business to evaluate the competency of beta testers and select the external testers who are both unbiased and committed.