NelsonHall Names Applause a Leader for Crowdtesting

No other crowdsourcing vendor provides immediate benefits to clients as well as Applause, according to analyst firm NelsonHall. In evaluating 10 crowdsourcing vendors in its recent NEAT report, NelsonHall again ranked Applause as a leader.

It’s the second straight version of the crowdsourcing NEAT report that names Applause as a leader.

NelsonHall’s evaluation praised Applause’s commitment to ensuring clients receive prompt and actionable results, as well as our investment in new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI).

Speed is the name of the game

What enables us to provide clients with immediate benefits? It all comes back to our community of highly skilled testers, who are always ready to work. When a client approaches us needing immediate feedback on a build, they receive it within hours. Even if the client provides the build at the end of a business day, it goes straight to a customized test team for around-the-clock service.

Our vetted and experienced testers vigorously examine the build and deliver a bug report by the following morning. With highly vetted and skilled testers spanning the globe, we can determine within hours if your software works as it should.

Applause Community members not only work fast, but are the best at what they do. Applause’s testing academy helps testers develop and improve the skills they need to methodically validate builds. Many testers specialize in specific testing types, such as functional, accessibility or voice testing. This combination of specialized skills and speed provides immediate results for our clients.

“We are able to turn the app on for a location literally the day after training because of what we learned working with Applause,” said Zach Koff, Shake Shack COO.

Agile with Applause

NelsonHall also praised Applause for integrating into Agile and continuous testing workflows through the Applause Platform. The Applause Platform enables clients to easily point to their build, define their test scope and choose tester requirements such as devices, locations or languages directly from the interface.

“Applause continues to make its service portfolio relevant to agile and continuous testing,” said Dominique Raviart, NelsonHall’s IT Services Practice Director. “The company now complements its crowdtesting services with its Applause Platform for test script execution and has a comprehensive continuous testing offering.”

Applause continues to make its service portfolio relevant to agile and continuous testing

Dominique Raviart, NelsonHall’s IT Services Practice Director

AI arrives

Our new AI offering continues to separate us from the crowdsourcing pack. AI is taking over the world, and customers expect that AI will provide them with unparalleled speed and efficiency.

Applause can help your organization fine-tune its AI algorithm in two critical ways:

1. The Applause Community can quickly deliver any dataset required to train an AI algorithm, including text, images, speech, handwriting, documents, intents and biometrics. With our globally diverse community, this training data will help you avoid the dreaded AI bias.
2. The Applause Community tests your AI-powered user experience throughout the development process to validate that your algorithms are producing accurate, human-like and useful results. This testing data confirms that your AI produces the results it should.

With all this excitement surrounding Applause, it’s validating and humbling for us to again be named a leader in the NelsonHall NEAT evaluation. It’s also motivating as we look toward 2020 and beyond, because we know innovation will help us maintain our status as a leader.

What’s next?

We recently announced Applause Labs, which will keep us on the cutting edge of technology and bring next-generation testing concepts to life.

Applause Labs’ debut innovation is the Applause Quality Score (AQS), which is the first quantitative measurement of digital quality. Our decade-plus of historical data has shown us what quality looks like and we are bringing that knowledge directly to our clients.

With the AQS, organizations can see the level of quality they are achieving with every build, based on a score from 0 to 100. Ultimately, organizations can use AQS as a barometer to determine whether a build is ready to go live.

These are exciting times for Applause, but more importantly, as NelsonHall noted, they are even better for our clients — and we can’t wait for what comes next.