CrowdBeans offers an alternative way to test mobile applications. They distribute the apps to be tested to a crowd, which checks and reports bugs. Testers get paid for every bug reported

Amritanshu Anand and Anshul Singhal have the best possible ecosystem needed to start a company. They are students at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur, where incubating start-ups are the norm. There are currently close to a dozen start-ups on the campus and the number is only increasing. The campus proved to be a fertile ground for Anand and Singhal, too, to seed their business called CrowdBeans, which offers an alternative way to test mobile applications. The campus also gives them access to a large universe of IIT alumni to link with and learn from, besides access to ideas and, when needed, a door to angel investors and seed funds.

Anand acknowledges that being at IIT has its advantages when it comes to ideating, networking and mentoring. Even though he is privileged to be a part of the institute, things back home in Patna, Bihar, are changing too, says Anand, with more and more college students looking at start-up options.

Engineering colleges have also started adapting to the trend, says Anand. Lots of youngsters, who left the state to work in IT hubs, are now returning to set up their own companies, he says, and there are today many start-ups in the fields of education and agriculture, among others. But it?s a trend that will take some time to build up.

A fourth-year student studying earth sciences, Anand says CrowdBeans, a crowd-powered mobile app testing platform, provides in-the-wild testing services that span the entire software development lifecycle, including functional, security, load, localisation and usability testing. So far, CrowdBeans has created a community of 200 testers, all from IIT Kharagpur, who put mobile applications through their paces by testing on real devices under real-world conditions. The CrowdBeans community provides developers a chance to test their apps on various platforms and across a wide range of handsets. It speeds up the whole testing process, taking just 15-25 days instead of the usual 45. The costs are much lower too.

While developing mobile applications, the challenge is to test whether these apps work well on various mobile phones and their variants, besides spotting bugs and fixing them before launching the applications. It is tough and expensive for those developing apps to have access to a vast range of smartphones and their different versions. They have to depend on their family and friends, a method that?s not very reliable. Using professional testers also involves more cost, besides a lot of effort and time.

Therefore, Anand?s idea was to distribute the app to be tested to a crowd. This crowd could be from anywhere in the country and would have different kinds of phones. The people in the crowd check the compatibility of these applications with their phones and send reports for which they are compensated. Testers get paid for every bug reported.