An Investigation Into Internet Crowdsourcing for Enterprise Software Development

Recent years have witnessed the continuing development of the Internet from its original communication purpose (e.g., email), content provision (e.g., Web) and software deployment platform (e.g. SaaS) to a software development platform for enterprise. This paper investigated crowd sourcing, in particular its application to the software development sector. By making use of this method developers can be recruited from around the world, resulting in a wide range of expertise and more manageable workload. This paper considers a number of ways which crowd sourcing can be applied to existing software development methods and techniques, as well as exploring and evaluating the benefits and constraints of such methods. The paper used data gathered from the Top Coder platform to assess the skill levels and demographics of the current crowd sourcing user base. This paper also examined a wider range of crowd sourcing platforms to discover which features makes platforms successful and how they can be applied to a software engineering platform. Recommendations are then made as to what should constitute a software engineering specific crowd sourcing platform.