What is the Digivante community and how does it work?

Digivante’s vast community is made up of thousands of testers, located in 149 countries around the world. Our community plays a key part in how Digivante can rapidly deliver professional software, website and app testing at scale.

You might be reading this and thinking that despite being very fast, using crowdtesters will automatically mean lower quality testing. However, even though it is thousands strong, the Digivante community is not open to anyone. Only the highest quality testers are allowed to become members of our community, with applicants vetted by an entrance exam that requires a high pass rate of 90%. Only around 20% of applicants make it through to become a Digivante tester. Successful applicants are also rewarded with competitive pay that is above the market rate, ensuring that we attract the best testing talent to our community.

A vigorous review process for tests

Along with only accepting the highest quality applicants, to further improve our quality control the Digivante community also has a vigorous review process. All issues that are identified by testers must pass a three-factor verification process.

Firstly, our highly skilled and experienced testers identify any issues and raise them via our testing portal, along with evidence (such as screenshots or screen recordings) and clear steps to reproduce.

The next part of the process involves another member of the community checking the issue, seeing that it can be reproduced to ensure it is valid, and to make sure that it is within scope for the project.

Finally, all issues that make it this far are then reviewed by senior Test Managers, before being passed over to the client.

The community is trained to check for duplicates before submitting an issue, so you will never receive the same issue reported twice. Issue reports are clear and precise, allowing our customers’ development teams to get straight to working on the issues that matter most, without any added fluff.

Not only can Digivante’s global community help speed up your QA process, but it also ensures that the quality of testing remains just as high as using your own internal team. Find out more about the misconceptions of crowdtesting in the ‘Guide to making the crowd work for you’.

Ensuring privacy for your projects

Upon taking part in a project, all Digivante community testers must first sign a non-disclosure agreement. This must happen before they can view any material related to the project.

Digivante is committed to maintaining customer privacy and security, and our non-disclosure agreements help to affirm this. We are also able to use our tester tier system to select our best and most trusted groups of testers for our clients should a project require it.

Digivante tester tiers

Our testers tiers are assigned to testers based on various performance-related factors, such as the number of issues the tester has found and the issue approval ratings, and while all testers must meet a minimum standard in order to test for us in the first place, only the best testers make it to our higher tiers.

Upon joining our testing community, testers are assigned the “unrated” tier, before quickly progressing up to “Bronze” and “Silver” as they begin to find issues within projects whilst maintaining a good acceptance rate. The best testers who continue to deliver the highest quality work move up through our “Gold”, “Platinum” and eventually our “Elite” tiers, joining the very best testers our community has to offer. Testers in higher tiers are also rewarded with higher payouts to encourage them to continue testing at the highest level.

Real people, real devices

Having access to such a large, high quality testing community also offers many other benefits to our clients and their internal QA teams. As you would expect, thousands of testers means thousands of devices, and our community is able to deliver genuine feedback with almost endless device, browser, and OS combinations. No emulators needed here – just real people testing on real devices, using them exactly as your real customers would do in real world scenarios. This really is cross-browser testing like no other (also often known as compatibility testing).

Localisation is another big reason why Digivante’s customers love our community. While it is true that there are options for automation, when it comes to localisation such as translating web pages or apps into multiple languages, having a local tester who is able to speak the language natively can be invaluable. We all know that automated translations tools are not the best at times, so having someone who is able to go through and check for errors, whilst simultaneously checking the content and context to make sure everything makes sense from a local market perspective can be extremely useful.

Having that local knowledge at hand can make all the difference in a customer believing you are a genuine business with a real interest and commitment to their location, and not just some global company looking to grow quickly and cheaply into other markets.

A managed testing service

If you think that involving a large global testing community in your QA operations sounds great in principle, but maybe a little complicated to manage, rest assured there is no need to worry. Digivante’s internal teams take care of all the tester management, from inviting the right testers to the project and offering the right incentives, to getting the project started and triaging the issues that the community finds, leaving you and your internal team free to do what you do best.

When it comes to selecting the right testers for the job, we will work with you to understand the requirements then find the best-fit testers from within our community , filtering by device/OS combinations, language, locations and more. We’re with you every step of the way to make sure you are able to speed up your QA process without compromising on quality.

Teamwork is something that is strongly encouraged within the Digivante community. Whilst it is true that we do have thousands of testers, we do not consider them merely faces in a crowd. Along with our high quality, custom testing portal, our testers also have access to additional communication platforms like Discord should the project require it. Use of these platforms allows the opportunity for collaboration, and also gives the testers easy access to speak with test leads and community management.

As our community is made up of freelancers, they are encouraged to pick up work whenever they like, and their flexibility helps our customers fit their QA testing around their already busy release cycles. Need to run some testing overnight or over a weekend ahead of a new release? The Digivante community has you covered.

Types of testing best suited to the crowdtesting community

Our global community of testers can carry out many types of testing from the most straightforward exploratory test, where are testers are given the freedom to fully explore a website or application and uncover hidden issues, through to speedy regression testing, enabling customers to continuously release new functionality without the risk of breaking something.

Exploratory testing is one of the more engaging types of testing for our community. It gives a sense of challenge, and testers can explore a customer’s site or app from many weird and wonderful perspectives that one person alone would never think of. As we like to put it, you really will find things that you did not know you needed to know. Of course, the community can also be instructed to look in, or indeed not look in certain areas of the site. For example, if you are running an exploratory test in a test environment, you may not be interested in spelling and grammar, only functionality. In that case, we can instruct our testing community to overlook and discount any spelling and grammar issues that they might encounter, saving you the bother of reviewing potentially hundreds of issues that you have no interest in.

Cut regression testing time from weeks to days

We have already briefly touched on regression testing, but did you know that by using the Digivante community for your regression testing, you could cut testing time from weeks to days, or even hours in some cases? Regression testing with the Digivante community allows you to run all your test cases simultaneously rather than one by one, making an enormous difference to the speed of execution, especially for those customers who have exceptionally large test packs. Our internal team brings vast knowledge and experience of creating test packs and is able to either create an entirely new test pack from scratch or adapt an existing pack to run through the Digivante portal.

Along with the most obvious benefit of speed, running test packs through our community also allows for broad coverage, running the same tests with various device and browser combinations for example. No matter how many new features our customers have, our community is always hungry to test everything in the pack, with no test case getting missed.

Ensuring your site works for everyone

Another fantastic example of how the community can save you a huge amount of time and effort without compromising on quality is through accessibility testing. Around 15% of the world’s population has a disability, and so ensuring that your site meets internationally recognised Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG2.2) is important to ensure you serve that audience. Some countries such as Canada and the USA have legal rules to enforce certain accessibility standards, with significant fines for non-compliance, not to mention the damage to your reputation by not being inclusive.

With that in mind, it is important to get accessibility testing right, but getting it right can take time that you might not have in your busy schedule.

Our standard accessibility test pack features 79 different test cases, which, if completed properly would take an internal team around 4-5 days to run through. You might not have 4-5 days to set aside for accessibility testing, but you know the importance of getting it right. Getting the Digivante community involved could cut that time down to just an hour or two, and don’t forget that includes the standard community three-factor verification I mentioned earlier, plus screen recordings and steps to reproduce. It really is impressive stuff.

Targeting specific audiences for usability testing

Our vast pool of testers around the world also offers us significant advantages when it comes to usability testing. Having such a large and global community allows us to specifically target specific individuals within our community who meet your audience requirements for a project. Making sure you have the right individuals for your usability testing project is of course key to getting the results you are looking for. When you’re working on a site or app day in, day out, it is often easy to look at it in a closed manner, not through any fault of your own but simply because of how humans react to something that we are used to. Real users often act in a way that is not very predictable, throwing up issues or reactions that you may not expect, which is why it is vitally important to have access to the right testers to help you highlight those issues, and ensure that your customers have the best experience possible.

Offline Testing in the real world

Offline testing takes localisation to a whole new level. Ever wondered what the end-to-end journey is like for a customer in Brazil? With the Digivante community you can find out. We can select testers who live in Brazil to test the entire buying journey of a new ecommerce website from start to finish; instructing them to buy a product from your website or app, have it delivered to their house and then return the item via your returns process, evaluating the entire experience from start to finish.