Quasi-Crowdsourcing Testing for Educational Projects ∗

The idea of crowdsourcing tasks in software engineering, e-specially software testing, has gained popularity in recent years. Crowdsourcing testing and educational projects are natural complementary. One of the challenges of crowd-sourcing testing is to find a number of qualified workers with low cost. Students in software engineering are suitable candidates for crowdsourcing testing. On the other hand, practical projects play a key role in software engineering e-ducation. In order to enhance educational project outcomes and achieve industrial-strength training, we need to provide the opportunity for students to be exposed to commercial software development. In this paper, we report a preliminary study on crowd-sourcing testing for educational projects. We introduce three commercial software products as educational testing projects, which are crowdsourced by our teaching support system. We call this“Quasi-Crowdsourcing Test ” (QCT) because the candidate workers are students, who have certain social re-lations. The investigation results are encouraging and show to be beneficial to both the students and industry in QCT projects