Virtualization has great potential to empower the ‘crowd’ for crowdsourcing. Specialized test suites, test harnesses, test tools can be one-clicked into virtual machines that can be used by anyone, anywhere. Just as software developers of today can reuse the code of their colleagues and forebears, so too will the testers in the crowd be able to reuse test suites and test tools. And just as that reuse has increased the range of applications that a given developer can reliably build, it will increase the types of applications that a tester can test. Virtualization enables the immediate reuse of complicated and sophisticated test infrastructures.

Conveniently, virtualization does the same favor for testers with respect to user environments. A user can simply one-click their entire computer into a virtual machine and make it available to testers via the cloud. If we can store all the videos in the world for instant viewing by anyone, anywhere then why can’t we do the same with virtual user environments? Virtualization technology is already there (in the case of PCs) or nearly there (in the case of mobile or other specialized environments). We simply need to apply it to the testing problem.
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