DEVOPSdigest

Applause revealed three new initiatives from Applause Labs – the company’s R&D and innovation engine.

The Applause Labs team is focused on accelerating innovation, with the goal of exploring and developing new features and solutions that will benefit both Applause’s clients and community of testers. Applause’s crowdsourced community, uTest, is a large diverse group of digital experts. Consisting of vetted and trained testers in a variety of disciplines – including manual, automated, usability and accessibility testing, among other areas – the community enables the world’s leading brands to test in the real world, in a flexible, responsive and efficient way.

The first two features to come out of Applause Labs – the Applause Quality Score and the Applause Accessibility Tool – were designed to help clients and end users. The latest Applause Labs initiatives are primarily focused on improving the tester experience.

- Geo-Location Capabilities for Customer Journey Testing: Applause’s Customer Journey Testing solution is in high demand. Restaurants and retailers are continuing to reinvent themselves by offering new customer journeys, such as contactless payments and curbside pickup. These types of customer journeys are new to many brands – often being added as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic to ensure customer safety – and require the real-world testing that only Applause can deliver. The growth of Applause’s Customer Journey Testing solution has required a new way to more easily target testers with projects based on their locations, and enable them to seamlessly participate in Customer Journey Testing opportunities. As part of the annual Vista Equity Partners Hackathon, and using the recently released uTest mobile app, Applause Labs developed a way for testers to opt-in to provide their geo-location data, enabling them to receive more personalized and geo-specific invitations to test cycles. This gives testers more opportunities to test and earn money while also providing clients with a more targeted group of testers with which to work.

- Device Recommendations: The more devices a tester has access to, the more project opportunities they have. Most testing must be done on a specific device (such as an iPhone 11 or Samsung Galaxy s9) to accurately represent the real-world experience on particular devices. Applause Labs prototyped ways to provide testers with insight into the devices that were most sought after and requested by clients, so that they understand what devices they should invest in to get more testing project invites.

- Virtual Device Cloud: Applause Labs also prototyped a virtual device cloud, which enables users to conduct manual functional testing – including both exploratory testing and test case execution – without actually owning the physical device that is being tested. With this virtual device cloud, a community member could, for example, complete exploratory testing on a virtual iPhone 12 without actually owning or having access to a physical iPhone 12. The technology for this virtual device cloud is all handled by Applause, so that testers don’t need any coding experience themselves to complete the testing.

“We are fully committed to innovation and delivering the best possible features to our clients, their end users and our community members,” said Jonathan Zaleski, Head of Applause Labs. “Our most recent exploration, ideation and prototypes have been focused on improving the tester experience to give community members more opportunities to test and earn money. These innovations would also benefit clients over time as they will have a larger pool of testers with the relevant devices to leverage.”