A data-driven game theoretic strategy for developers in software crowdsourcing: a case study

Crowdsourcing has the advantages of being cost-effective and saving time, which is a typical embodiment of collective wisdom and community workers’ collaborative development. However, this development paradigm of software crowdsourcing has not been used widely. A very important reason is that requesters have limited knowledge about crowd workers’ professional skills and qualities. Another reason is that the crowd workers in the competition cannot get the appropriate reward, which affects their motivation. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a method of maximizing reward based on the crowdsourcing ability of workers, they can choose tasks according to their own abilities to obtain appropriate bonuses. Our method includes two steps: Firstly, it puts forward a method to evaluate the crowd workers’ ability, then it analyzes the intensity of competition for tasks at Topcoder.com—an open community crowdsourcing platform—on the basis of the workers’ crowdsourcing ability; secondly, it follows dynamic programming ideas and builds game models under complete information in different cases, offering a strategy of reward maximization for workers by solving a mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium. This paper employs crowdsourcing data from Topcoder.com to carry out experiments. The experimental results show that the distribution of workers’ crowdsourcing ability is uneven, and to some extent it can show the activity degree of crowdsourcing tasks. Meanwhile, according to the strategy of reward maximization, a crowd worker can get the theoretically maximum reward

A goal model for crowdsourced software engineering

Crowdsourced Software Engineering (CSE) is the act of undertaking any external software engineering tasks by an undefined, potentially large group of online workers in an open call format. Using an open call, CSE recruits global online labor to work on various types of software engineering tasks, such as requirements extraction, design, coding and testing. The field is rising rapidly and touches various aspects of software engineering. CSE has grown significance in both academy and industry. Despite of the enormous usage and significance of CSE, there are many open challenges reported by various researchers. In order to overcome the challenges and realizing the full potential of CSE, it is highly important to understand the concrete advantages and goals of CSE. In this paper, we present a goal model for CSE, to understand the real environment of CSE, and to explore the aspects that can somehow overcome the aforementioned challenges. The model is designed using RiSD, a method for building Strategic Dependency (SD) models in the i* notation, applied in this work using iStar2.0. This work can be considered useful for CSE stakeholders (Requesters, Workers, Platform owners and CSE organizations).Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Technology for Good: Innovative Use of Technology by Charities

Technology for Good identifies ten technologies being used by charitable organizations in innovative ways. The report briefly introduces each technology and provides examples of how those technologies are being used.Examples are drawn from a broad spectrum of organizations working on widely varied issues around the globe. This makes Technology for Good a unique repository of inspiration for the public and private sectors, funders, and other change makers who support the creation and use of technology for social good

Mapping for the Masses: Accessing Web 2.0 through Crowdsourcing

The authors describe how we are harnessing the power of web 2.0 technologies to create new approaches to collecting, mapping, and sharing geocoded data. The authors begin with GMapCreator that lets users fashion new maps using Google Maps as a base. The authors then describe MapTube that enables users to archive maps and demonstrate how it can be used in a variety of contexts to share map information, to put existing maps into a form that can be shared, and to create new maps from the bottom-up using a combination of crowdcasting, crowdsourcing, and traditional broadcasting. The authors conclude by arguing that such tools are helping to define a neogeography that is essentially "mapping for the masses,'' while noting that there are many issues of quality, accuracy, copyright, and trust that will influence the impact of these tools on map-based communication

An Abstract Formal Basis for Digital Crowds

Crowdsourcing, together with its related approaches, has become very popular in recent years. All crowdsourcing processes involve the participation of a digital crowd, a large number of people that access a single Internet platform or shared service. In this paper we explore the possibility of applying formal methods, typically used for the verification of software and hardware systems, in analysing the behaviour of a digital crowd. More precisely, we provide a formal description language for specifying digital crowds. We represent digital crowds in which the agents do not directly communicate with each other. We further show how this specification can provide the basis for sophisticated formal methods, in particular formal verification.Comment: 32 pages, 4 figure

Innovation Initiatives in Large Software Companies: A Systematic Mapping Study

To keep the competitive advantage and adapt to changes in the market and technology, companies need to innovate in an organised, purposeful and systematic manner. However, due to their size and complexity, large companies tend to focus on maintaining their business, which can potentially lower their agility to innovate. This study aims to provide an overview of the current research on innovation initiatives and to identify the challenges of implementing the initiatives in the context of large software companies. The investigation was performed using a systematic mapping approach of published literature on corporate innovation and entrepreneurship. Then it was complemented with interviews with four experts with rich industry experience. Our study results suggest that, there is a lack of high quality empirical studies on innovation initiative in the context of large software companies. A total of 7 studies are conducted in such context, which reported 5 types of initiatives: intrapreneurship, bootlegging, internal venture, spin-off and crowdsourcing. Our study offers three contributions. First, this paper represents the map of existing literature on innovation initiatives inside large companies. The second contribution is to provide an innovation initiative tree. The third contribution is to identify key challenges faced by each initiative in large software companies. At the strategic and tactical levels, there is no difference between large software companies and other companies. At the operational level, large software companies are highly influenced by the advancement of Internet technology. Large software companies use open innovation paradigm as part of their innovation initiatives. We envision a future work is to further empirically evaluate the innovation initiative tree in large software companies, which involves more practitioners from different companies