Title: Creative software crowdsourcing: from components and algorithm development to project concept formations

Authors: Wenjun Wu; Wei-Tek Tsai; Wei Li

Addresses: State Key Laboratory of Software Development Environment, Beihang University, Beijing, 100191, China ' School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85281, USA; Department of Computer Science and Technology, INLIST, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China ' State Key Laboratory of Software Development Environment, Beihang University, Beijing, 100191, China

Abstract: Software development is complex and creative as it involves requirement analysis, design, architecture, coding and testing. Recently, software crowdsourcing has been popular with numerous software coders participated in various software competitions. This paper first analyses the data collected on software crowdsourcing and summarises major lessons learned. This paper then examines two software crowdsourcing processes including TopCoder and AppStori processes. Lastly, this paper identifies the min-max nature among participants as an important design element in software crowdsourcing for software quality and creativity. Although in a min-max game, one party tries to maximise the finding of bugs in a set of artefacts, and the other parties try to minimise the potential bugs in the same artefact, software crowdsourcing can still be a collaborative and win-win process for all parties. By using this approach, lots of aspects of software development can be crowdsourced with the crowd can contribute their creativity to each aspect.

Keywords: software crowdsourcing; software development; creativity; TopCoder; AppStori; game theory; software quality.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCRC.2013.056925

International Journal of Creative Computing, 2013 Vol.1 No.1, pp.57 - 91

Published online: 31 Jul 2014 *