The purpose of this market is to cover the crowdsourcing marketplace for testing, which we will refer to as crowdtesting. There are two main categories of crowdtesting services; vetted communities and unvetted communities. Vetted implies that the individuals have been vetted and verified by the crowdsourcing firm before connecting them with a client. There are also full service providers offering crowdtesting. This market concentrates on the pure-play vetted and unvetted providers.
“Application testing services” is a comprehensive term for the verification and validation services that support quality control and quality assurance (QA) of clients’ applications. Verification assesses whether a product/application or service complies with regulations, requirements, specifications or enforced constraints. Validation typically involves engagement with external customers to confirm suitability and acceptance. Infrastructure testing services, mobile device testing and software testing tools created for the market by independent software vendors (ISVs) are not included in this definition.
Gartner defines custom software development (CSD) services as the professional services engaged by organizations to design, build, modernize or iterate custom applications and software products to meet their unique business needs. CSD services entail gathering business requirements and coding applications from inception, building applications on a platform as a service (PaaS), or assembling applications from existing web services or other reusable pieces of code. Services marketed as “software product engineering” or “digital product development” likely fall under the CSD services category as defined by Gartner. These solutions are typically not available as commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products and require custom development.