Crowdsourcing software development

It is an open call for participation in any task of software development, including documentation, design, coding and testing.

Social networks can provide communication, documentation, blogs, twitters, wikis, comments, feedbacks, and indexing.

Apple’s App Store is an online iOS application market, where developers can directly deliver their creative designs and products to smartphone customers.

These developers are motivated to contribute innovative designs for both reputation and payment by the micro-payment mechanism of the App Store.

For example, AppStori introduces a crowd funding approach to build an online community for developing promising ideas about new iPhone applications.

Following this model, Topcoder has established an online platform to support its ecosystem and gathered a virtual global workforce with more than 1 million registered members and nearly 50,000 active participants.

All these Topcoder members compete against each other in software development tasks such as requirement analysis, algorithm design, coding, and testing.

It also has specific crowdsourcing processes involving unique activities such as bidding tasks, allocating experts, evaluating quality, and integrating software.

[citation needed] To support outsourcing process and facilitate community collaboration, a platform is usually built to provide necessary resources and services.

The reference architecture hence defines umbrella activities and structure for crowd-based software development by unifying best practices and research achievements.

Many advantages are to be found when moving crowdsourcing applications to the cloud: focus on project development rather than on the infrastructure that supports this process, foster the collaboration between geographically distributed teams, scale resources to the size of the projects, work in a virtualized, distributed, and collaborative environment.

The reference architecture presented above is designed to encompass generality in many dimensions including, for example different software development methodologies, incentive schemes, and competitive/collaborative approaches.

There are several clear research directions that could be investigated to enhance the architecture such as data analytics, service based delivery, and framework generalization.

As systems grow understanding the use of the platform is an important consideration, data regarding users, projects, and interaction between the two can all be explored to investigate performance.

[8] Knowledge and Intellectual Property: Motivation and Remuneration: There are the following levels of crowdsourcing:[citation needed] Level 1: single persons, well-defined modules, small size, limited time span (less than 2 months), quality products, current development processes such as the one by Topcoder and uTest.

At this level, coders are ranked, websites contains online repository crowdsourcing materials, software can be ranked by participants, have communication tools such as wiki, blogs, comments, software development tools such as IDE, testing, compilers, simulation, modeling, and program analysis.

[11] In 2011 the United States Patent and Trademark Office launching a crowdsourcing challenge under the America COMPETES Act on the Topcoder platform to develop for image processing algorithms and software to recognize figure and part labels in patent documents with a prize pool of $50,000 USD.

The solution of the contest winner achieved high accuracy in terms of recall and precision for the recognition of figure regions and part labels.