2nd International Workshop on Crowd Sourcing in Software Engineering (CSI-SE 2015)

Crowdsourcing is increasingly revolutionizing the ways in which software is engineered. Programmers increasingly crowdsource answering their questions through Q&A sites. Non-programmers may contribute human-intelligence to development projects, by, for example, usability testing software or even play games with a purpose to implicitly construct formal specifications. Crowdfunding helps to democratize decisions about what software to build. Software engineering researchers may even benefit from new opportunities to evaluate their work with real developers by recruiting developers from the crowd. CSI- SE will inform the software engineering community of current techniques and trends in crowdsourcing, discuss the application of crowdsourcing to software engineering to date, and identify new opportunities to apply crowdsourcing to solve software engineering problems

A general purpose conceptual model for crowdsourcing projects

Crowdsourcing is an approach that employs people to process input data to solve a computationally complex problem, such as generating a large dataset of annotated images, audio transcriptions or video scene descriptions. In this approach, people select tasks and produce individual results according to a list of steps that leads to an efficient solution. Then, every single result must be collected, interpreted, and integrated by a platform or system supporting the crowdsourcing process. This MSc dissertation starts with a state-of-the-art discussion, which provides an understanding of the main concepts and relationships reported in crowdsourcing projects found in the literature. By conducting a systematic review of crowdsourcing projects, we understand how these projects are designed and executed in the state-of-the-art, considering the following dimensions: Task execution, quality management, and platform usage. Our results summarized trends of the important aspects of a crowdsourcing project, such as crowd and task types, crowdsourcing platforms, and activities used to manage the quality; we also addressed functions and limitations in traditional crowdsourcing platforms, the definition of a crowdsourcing workflow, and the lack of standardization when designing a crowdsourcing project. In sequence, we developed a detailed conceptual model of crowdsourcing projects, specifying the essential entities and their relationships, based on the concepts leveraged in the accomplished systematic review. This work shows a class diagram that represents a general view of crowdsourcing projects, alongside with the concept of using an activity diagram to describe the execution of a specific project workflow, a neglected concept in previous works. To illustrate our contributions, the conceptual model is applied in some real crowdsourcing projects related to image annotation and segmentation data at scale, image QoE subjective assessments, software development, and cascading crowdsourcing to achieve complex video annotations

Crowd Intelligence in Requirements Engineering: Current Status and Future Directions

Software systems are the joint creative products of multiple stakeholders, including both designers and users, based on their perception, knowledge and personal preferences of the application context. The rapid rise in the use of Internet, mobile and social media applications make it even more possible to provide channels to link a large pool of highly diversified and physically distributed designers and end users, the crowd. Converging the knowledge of designers and end users in requirements engineering process is essential for the success of software systems. In this paper, we report the findings of a survey of the literature on crowd-based requirements engineering research. It helps us understand the current research achievements, the areas of concentration, and how requirements related activities can be enhanced by crowd intelligence. Based on the survey, we propose a general research map and suggest the possible future roles of crowd intelligence in requirements engineering

User Evaluation Framework for Model Finding Research

We report the results of a series of crowd-sourced user studies in the formal-methods domain. Specifically, we explore the efficacy of the notion of minimal counterexample -- or more colloquially, minimal bug report -- when reasoning about logical specifications. Our results here suggest that minimal counterexamples are beneficial some specific cases, and harmful in others. Furthermore, our analysis leads to refined hypotheses about the role of minimal counterexamples that can be further evaluated in future studies. User-based evaluation has little precedent in the formal methods community. Therefore, as a further contribution, we discuss and analyze our research methodology, and offer guidelines for future user studies in formal methods research

Software Process Simulation Modeling: Systematic literature review

Changes and continuous progress in logistics and productive systems make the realization of improvements in decision making necessary. Simulation is a good support tool for this type of decisions because it allows reproducing processes virtually to study their behavior, to analyze the impact of possible changes or to compare different design alternatives without the high cost of scale experiments. Although process simulation is usually focused on industrial processes, over the last two decades, new proposals have emerged to bring simulation techniques into software engineering. This paper describes a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) which returned 8070 papers (published from 2013 to 2019) by a systematic search in 4 digital libraries. After conducting this SLR, 36 Software Process Simulation Modeling (SPSM) works were selected as primary studies and were documented following a specific characterization scheme. This scheme allows characterizing each proposal according to the paradigm used and its technology base as well as its future line of work. Our purpose is to identify trends and directions for future research on SPSM after identifying and studying which proposals in this topic have been defined and the relationships and dependencies between these proposals in the last five years. After finishing this review, it is possible to conclude that SPSM continues to be a topic that is very much addressed by the scientific community, but each contribution has been proposed with particular goals. This review also concludes that Agent-Based Simulation and System Dynamics paradigm is increasing and decreasing, respectively, its trend among SPSM proposals in the last five years. Regarding Discrete-Event Simulation paradigm, it seems that it is strengthening its position among research community in recent years to design new approaches.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2016-76956-C3-2-

Human–Computer Interaction and Participation in Software Crowdsourcing

Improvements in communication and networking technologies have transformed people’s lives and organizations’ activities. Web 2.0 innovation has provided a variety of hybridized applications and tools that have changed enterprises’ functional and communication processes. People use numerous platforms to broaden their social contacts, select items, execute duties, and learn new things. Context: Crowdsourcing is an internet-enabled problem-solving strategy that utilizes human–computer interaction to leverage the expertise of people to achieve business goals. In crowdsourcing approaches, three main entities work in collaboration to solve various problems. These entities are requestors (job providers), platforms, and online users. Tasks are announced by requestors on crowdsourcing platforms, and online users, after passing initial screening, are allowed to work on these tasks. Crowds participate to achieve various rewards. Motivation: Crowdsourcing is gaining importance as an alternate outsourcing approach in the software engineering industry. Crowdsourcing application development involves complicated tasks that vary considerably from the micro-tasks available on platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk. To obtain the tangible opportunities of crowdsourcing in the realm of software development, corporations should first grasp how this technique works, what problems occur, and what factors might influence community involvement and co-creation. Online communities have become more popular recently with the rise in crowdsourcing platforms. These communities concentrate on specific problems and help people with solving and managing these problems. Objectives: We set three main goals to research crowd interaction: (1) find the appropriate characteristics of social crowd utilized for effective software crowdsourcing, (2) highlight the motivation of a crowd for virtual tasks, and (3) evaluate primary participation reasons by assessing various crowds using Fuzzy AHP and TOPSIS method. Conclusion: We developed a decision support system to examine the appropriate reasons of crowd participation in crowdsourcing. Rewards and employments were evaluated as the primary motives of crowds for accomplishing tasks on crowdsourcing platforms, knowledge sharing was evaluated as the third reason, ranking was the fourth, competency was the fifth, socialization was sixth, and source of inspiration was the seventh.Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University Researchers Supporting - Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Project number (PNURSP2023TR140)

Information Technology (IT) enabled crowdsourcing: A conceptual framework

IT-enabled crowdsourcing is defined as technology-enabled outsourcing of tasks through an open call to the masses via the internet. Crowdsourcing is an IT artifact that has gone beyond the traditional boundaries of an organization to a much broader context. Over the past decade, research and practice on crowdsourcing have continued to grow, evolve, and revolutionize the way work gets done. Although numerous studies have been conducted in this area, our understanding of the main components involved in crowdsourcing processes remains limited. The goal of the current study is to conduct a structured literature review and synthesize the available crowdsourcing literature and applications in one coherent conceptual framework. The framework identifies the main elements involved in the crowdsourcing process and its characteristics. This framework extends the field of Information Systems (IS) and would help us better understand this phenomenon. Furthermore, the results of this study could potentially fill the knowledge gap in the crowdsourcing literature by identifying the main characteristics of a crowdsourcing process as a legitimate, IT-enabled form of problem-solving. Our results would also help organizations to leverage crowdsourcing more efficiently