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

Traceability-based Change Awareness

Abstract. Many tools in software engineering projects support the visualization and collaborative modification of custom sets of artifacts. This includes tools for requirements engineering, UML tools for design, project management tools, developer tools and many more. A key factor for success in software engineering projects is the collective understanding of changes applied to these artifacts. To support this, there are several strategies to automatically notify project participants about relevant changes. Known strategies are limited to a fixed set of artifacts and/or make no use of traceability information to supply change notifications. This paper proposes a change notification approach based on traceability in a unified model and building upon operation-based change tracking. The unified model explicitly combines system specification models and project management models into one fully traceable model. To show the benefit of our approach we compare it to related approaches in a case study

Two’s company, three’s a crowd: a case study of crowdsourcing software development

Crowdsourcing is an emerging and promising approach which involves delegating a variety of tasks to an unknown workforce— the crowd. Crowdsourcing has been applied quite successfully in various contexts from basic tasks on Amazon Mechanical Turk to solving complex industry problems, e.g. InnoCentive. Companies are increasingly using crowdsourcing to accomplish specific software development tasks. However, very little research exists on this specific topic. This paper presents an in-depth industry case study of crowdsourcing software development at a multinational corporation. Our case study highlights a number of challenges that arise when crowdsourcing software development. For example, the crowdsourcing development process is essentially a waterfall model and this must eventually be integrated with the agile approach used by the company. Crowdsourcing works better for specific software development tasks that are less complex and stand-alone without interdependencies. The development cost was much greater than originally expected, overhead in terms of company effort to prepare specifications and answer crowdsourcing community queries was much greater, and the time-scale to complete contests, review submissions and resolve quality issues was significant. Finally, quality issues were pushed later in the lifecycle given the lengthy process necessary to identify and resolve quality issues. Given the emphasis in software engineering on identifying bugs as early as possible, this is quite problematic