The Key Considerations In Building A Crowd-testing Platform For Software Developers

External testing of mobile software on a larger number of mobile devices by several users is often needed to ensure quality. Currently, the evidence as to what extent developers accept large-scale crowd-testing is limited. This paper aims to (1) gauge developers' perspectives with respect to the participation of the public and anonymous crowd testers, with varied experiences; (2) gather the developers' needs that could reduce their concerns of dealing with the public crowd testers and increase the opportunity of using the crowd-testing platforms. An online exploratory survey, conducted to included 50 Android and iOS developers from different countries with diverse experiences. This paper revealed several findings including the information that must be provided by developers and crowd testers for achieving effective crowd-testing process; the factors that can ensure the reliability and accuracy of the results provided by the public crowd testers. The findings conclude that (90%) of developers are potentially willing to perform testing via the public crowd testers worldwide. This on condition that several fundamental features were available which enable them to perform 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. We aim at helping the individual or small development teams who have limited resources to perform large-scale testing of their products.