Human Computation and Convergence

Humans are the most effective integrators and producers of information, directly and through the use of information-processing inventions. As these inventions become increasingly sophisticated, the substantive role of humans in processing information will tend toward capabilities that derive from our most complex cognitive processes, e.g., abstraction, creativity, and applied world knowledge. Through the advancement of human computation - methods that leverage the respective strengths of humans and machines in distributed information-processing systems - formerly discrete processes will combine synergistically into increasingly integrated and complex information processing systems. These new, collective systems will exhibit an unprecedented degree of predictive accuracy in modeling physical and techno-social processes, and may ultimately coalesce into a single unified predictive organism, with the capacity to address societies most wicked problems and achieve planetary homeostasis.Comment: Pre-publication draft of chapter. 24 pages, 3 figures; added references to page 1 and 3, and corrected typ

Crowdsourcing in Software Development: A State-of-the-Art Analysis

As software development cycles become shorter and shorter, while software complexity increases and IT budgets stagnate, many companies are looking for new ways of acquiring and sourcing knowledge outside their boundaries. One promising solution to aggregate know-how and manage large distributed teams in software development is crowdsourcing. This paper analyzes the existing body of knowledge regarding crowdsourcing in software development. As a result, we propose a fundamental framework with five dimensions to structure the existing insights of crowdsourcing in the context of software development and to derive a research agenda to guide further research

A survey of the use of crowdsourcing in software engineering

The term 'crowdsourcing' was initially introduced in 2006 to describe an emerging distributed problem-solving model by online workers. Since then it has been widely studied and practiced to support software engineering. In this paper we provide a comprehensive survey of the use of crowdsourcing in software engineering, seeking to cover all literature on this topic. We first review the definitions of crowdsourcing and derive our definition of Crowdsourcing Software Engineering together with its taxonomy. Then we summarise industrial crowdsourcing practice in software engineering and corresponding case studies. We further analyse the software engineering domains, tasks and applications for crowdsourcing and the platforms and stakeholders involved in realising Crowdsourced Software Engineering solutions. We conclude by exposing trends, open issues and opportunities for future research on Crowdsourced Software Engineering

Collaborating with the Crowd for Software Requirements Engineering: A Literature Review

Requirements engineering (RE) represents a decisive success factor in software development. The novel approach of crowd-based RE seeks to overcome shortcomings of traditional RE practices such as the resource intensiveness and selection bias of stakeholder workshops or interviews. Two streams of research on crowd-based RE can be observed in literature: data-driven approaches that extract requirements from user feedback or analytics data and collaborative approaches in which requirements are collectively developed by a crowd of software users. As yet, research surveying the state of crowd-based RE does not put particular emphasis on collaborative approaches, despite collaborative crowdsourcing being particularly suited for joint ideation and complex problem-solving tasks. Addressing this gap, we conduct a structured literature review to identify the RE activities supported by collaborative crowd-based approaches. Our research provides a systematic overview of the domain of collaborative crowd-based RE and guides researchers and practitioners in increasing user involvement in RE