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Open Access
Article
Publication date: 28 April 2020

Qamar Naith and Fabio Ciravegna

This paper aims to gauge developers’ perspectives regarding the participation of the public and anonymous crowd testers worldwide, with a range of varied experiences. It also aims…

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to gauge developers’ perspectives regarding the participation of the public and anonymous crowd testers worldwide, with a range of varied experiences. It also aims to gather their needs that could reduce their concerns of dealing with the public crowd testers and increase the opportunity of using the crowdtesting platforms.

Design/methodology/approach

An online exploratory survey was conducted to gather information from the participants, which included 50 mobile application developers from various countries with diverse experiences across Android and iOS mobile platforms.

Findings

The findings revealed that a significant proportion (90%) of developers is potentially willing to perform testing via the public crowd testers worldwide. This on condition that several fundamental features were available, which enable them to achieve more realistic tests without artificial environments on large numbers of devices. The results also demonstrated that a group of developers does not consider testing as a serious job that they have to pay for, which can affect the gig-economy and global market.

Originality/value

This paper provides new insights for future research in the study of how acceptable it is to work with public and anonymous crowd workers, with varying levels of experience, to perform tasks in different domains and not only in software testing. In addition, it will assist individual or small development teams who have limited resources or who do not have thousands of testers in their private testing community, to perform large-scale testing of their products.

Details

International Journal of Crowd Science, vol. 4 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2398-7294

Keywords

Open Access
Article
Publication date: 13 November 2018

Qamar Naith and Fabio Ciravegna

This paper aims to support small mobile application development teams or companies performing testing on a large variety of operating systems versions and mobile devices to ensure…

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Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to support small mobile application development teams or companies performing testing on a large variety of operating systems versions and mobile devices to ensure their seamless working.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper proposes a “hybrid crowdsourcing” method that leverages the power of public crowd testers. This leads to generating a novel crowdtesting workflow Developer/Tester- Crowdtesting (DT-CT) that focuses on developers and crowd testers as key elements in the testing process without the need for intermediate as managers or leaders. This workflow has been used in a novel crowdtesting platform (AskCrowd2Test). This platform enables testing the compatibility of mobile devices and applications at two different levels, high-level (device characteristics) or low-level (code). Additionally, a “crowd-powered knowledge base” has been developed that stores testing results, relevant issues and their solutions.

Findings

The comparison of the presented DT-CT workflow with the common and most recent crowdtesting workflows showed that DT-CT may positively impact the testing process by reducing time-consuming and budget spend because of the direct interaction of developers and crowd testers.

Originality/value

To authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to propose crowdtesting workflow based on developers and public crowd testers without crowd managers or leaders, which light the beacon for the future research in this field. Additionally, this work is the first that authorizes crowd testers with a limited level of experience to participate in the testing process, which helps in studying the behaviors and interaction of end-users with apps and obtains more concrete results.

Article
Publication date: 13 May 2019

Süleyman Barutçu

The purpose of this paper is threefold: first, to draw health managers’, clinicians’, entrepreneurs’ and mobile apps designers’ attention toward new mobile health applications…

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is threefold: first, to draw health managers’, clinicians’, entrepreneurs’ and mobile apps designers’ attention toward new mobile health applications (mHealth apps); second, to define mHealth apps design characteristics intended for doctors; and third, to highlight how mHealth apps can be designed using quality function deployment/house of quality (QFD/HOQ) techniques from doctors’ perspectives.

Design/methodology/approach

Data were collected through a survey and in-depth interviews with doctors to understand their needs and attitudes toward mHealth apps. Analytic hierarchy process, QFD and HOQ methods were used to analyze data.

Findings

Doctors agreed that mHealth apps provide them with the tools to improve their service and to become more efficient. Once the 12 doctors’ wants were collected, they were prioritized according to their significance and used for mHealth apps development. Eight technical characteristics that cater to doctors’ expectations were sorted. The authors suggest that mHealth app designers need to provide design requirements recommended by health personnel for a higher satisfaction level.

Originality/value

Healthcare managers are focusing on increasing their efficiency, patient satisfaction and care quality, and decreasing costs. For these purposes, mHealth revolution and mHealth apps have high potential for improving doctor effectiveness and healthcare quality. This study is among the first to: define Turkish doctors’ wants from mHealth apps; elaborate the app’s technical characteristics; and increase design quality, which is implied in improving app design. This research makes a significant contribution to define doctors’ wants from mHealth apps, to elaborate their technical characteristics and to increase mHealth apps design quality using QFD.

Details

International Journal of Health Care Quality Assurance, vol. 32 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0952-6862

Keywords

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