Crowdsourced Software Design Platforms: Critical Assessment

Reem Aliady,Sultan Alyahya

doi:10.3844/jcssp.2018.546.561

Abstract

There is a great interest towards the use of crowdsourcing into software development activities including: Requirements engineering, implementation, testing, evaluation and the focus of this research, design. Software design is one of the least explored activities within the concept of crowdsourcing. Therefore, this research provides a comprehensive coverage on the current state-of-the-art in the use of crowdsourcing in software design. It analyzes the current existing major crowdsourced software design platforms and discusses their workflows. The analysis results in identifying a set of limitations in the current platforms and improvements are proposed to overcome those limitations. Both findings of this research including (limitations and improvements) are validated by creating and distributing a questionnaire to software practitioners to justify the need to overcome those limitations through the proposed improvements.

Highlights

Software development using crowdsourcing has been gaining an increasing attention in the recent years
Software development using crowdsourcing has been used in many software development activities such as requirements engineering, implementation, testing, verification and design
The majority of crowdsourced software design platforms are presented with an elaboration on their workflows

Summary

Introduction

Software development using crowdsourcing has been gaining an increasing attention in the recent years. The major phases in software development include requirements analysis, design, implementation, testing and evaluation (Bassil, 2012). Software design is the phase after requirements analysis and before the implementation It is the process of creating specifications of the software product based on given constraints and goals (Sommerville, 2011). The other approach is called action centric and views the design process as creative-driven improvised task. This approach uses reflection on action where a designer designs the solution as a reflection of conversation between him and the situation in which he alternates between conceptualizing the problem and making a move evaluating that move.

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Conclusion