Abstract
Crowdsourced Software Engineering (CSE) is an application of online problem-solving model that provides a dynamic way of harnessing crowd intelligence in obtaining creative solutions. It consists of four elements: crowdsourcer, crowd, platform, and tasks. Although CSE offers various advantages to software engineering practices, recent research highlighted that there is still a lack of thorough understanding of Intellectual Property (IP) ownership rights of CSE elements. Therefore, management and control of CSE for obtaining adequate IP from the crowd is inevitable to reduce the risks of using that IP. This paper reviews existing CSE platforms and analyses associated IP challenges encountered by software engineering activities. 51 platforms were preselected and amongst these, analyses were performed on 37 CSE platforms. Exclusion of 11 platforms is on the basis of unavailability and 3 of which are linked to the same webpage. It also shows that 59% of the platforms acquire IP ownership of deliverables submitted by the crowd while 19% do not have a statement which provides clarity on IP ownership in their legal documents. This paper is significant in providing better understanding of IP risks of these CSE platforms and in assisting both crowdsourcers and the crowd in choosing crowdsourcing platforms based on the default IP ownership specification, which is often specified in legal documents of these platforms.
Highlights
Crowdsourcing today has obtained increasing demand because of its ability to delegate a variety of tasks which are requested by individuals, institutions, and organizations to an unknown workforce who is able to accomplish the tasks
The analysis performed to the timeline of the 45 platforms provide answer to RQ2: When did the platforms emerge in the market? Within the context of software engineering, the rising number of Crowdsourced Software Engineering (CSE) platforms indicates the successful shift of software development activities from small isolated group to an online open pool of software engineering professionals who work together, building state-of-the-art solutions and bringing down the development cost [1, 42]
This paper focuses on identification of CSE platforms and Intellectual Property (IP) challenges encountered by the crowdsourcing users
Summary
Crowdsourcing today has obtained increasing demand because of its ability to delegate a variety of tasks which are requested by individuals, institutions, and organizations to an unknown workforce who is able to accomplish the tasks These requested tasks from different areas are usually assigned by means of an open call format through a variety of online platforms [1]. In June 2006, the term ‘crowdsourcing’ was first introduced by Jeff Howe and Mark Robinson in Wired magazine [2] as “the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call This can take the form of peerproduction (when the job is performed collaboratively), but is often undertaken by sole individuals. Among the known crowdsourcing strategies include crowd creation, crowd wisdom, crowd funding, and crowd voting as explained in [11,12]
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