How to use the power of the crowd to test a product. Save time and money.

4 min readSep 16, 2020

We are a boutique company, which works with niche product development. We were recently working on building a complex Blockchain product as well as a Bonds Trading application.

There were few bugs in created applications viz. fields name, sometimes values, and at times data wasn’t reflecting correctly. the scenario is similar in any application development…. Isn't it?

The challenge was, being a nimble startup, we neither had an army of testers nor had ample time to have a dedicated and costly testing phase. Therefore, everything had to happen while the application was getting build.

Our application’s release and deployment were automatic via AWS SAM templates for AWS Serverless Lambda using the AWS Code pipeline.

To get holistic and fast feedback, we gave system access to our teams from different domains, this was to understand the design elements and to get initial feedback and thereafter corrective action if required.

Subsequently, we started receiving calls, messages, and sometimes email from project members or other team members mentioning issues/concerns and what isn’t working or what needs to be changed.

Since this was getting unstructured and sometimes getting missed, so for streamlining the process of reporting a bug, team members were required to open the JIRA ticket with bug/issue details for reporting the same. The idea was that the reporting of issues would ensure registering of bug issues and for the same all members needed to open the issue ticket, followed by the closure of the ticket as per criticality by the product development team.

It was expected that by setting up the systematic process for bug reporting, things would work as planned,

but I realized the number of reported issues/suggestions decreased by 70–80%.

So what was the reason behind the major drop in the reporting of bugs/issues? Did that mean in one week, had we changed the applications to the extent that it was almost bug-free? Absolutely hard to believe. Since that was not possible so then what was the reason, why suddenly bug reporting stopped?

After evaluating the situation, it was observed that reporting a bug through systematic channels like jeera, was a time-consuming activity hence team members generally avoided reporting those bugs/issues.

Lesson Learnt: Defining a process and even implementing same within the organization promises a false comfort that things will work as intended. While defining a process the key element to look out for is to validate weather the process actually reduces the friction. Needless to say, if your process increases the friction then it is bound to fail.

So going forward with the learning, now our objective was to reduce the friction thus created w.r.t. reporting a bug/suggestion.

So we hit upon the idea of building a bug report library, which ensured convenient reporting of bugs/concerns/issues without creating undue pressure to the team member. Since its creation, we have been regularly getting feedbacks inputs and reporting of bugs for improvement of the system and thus fulfilled the dual purpose of easy and convenient reporting and improvement in application. We wish to help others in their process and learn from our learning therefore the library module thus created is free to use by any product company. You can access it from npm.