Crowdsourcing Software Task Assignment Method for Collaborative Development

Abstract

Software crowdsourcing is an emerging and promising software development model. It is based on the characteristics of Internet community intelligence, which makes it have certain advantages in development cost and product quality. Companies are increasingly using crowdsourcing to accomplish specific software development tasks. However, this development model still faces many challenges. One of the key issues is the collaboration between crowdsourced workers. Developer collaboration is important to software development, but workers in crowdsourcing come from an undefined network community, so it's hard to guarantee that they can work together. This paper focuses on task assignment and uses the active time of workers as the basis of grouping to provide a solution for multi-task to multi-worker allocation. Based on the on-demand distribution model, this paper considers three factors: worker's ability, task module complexity, and worker's active time. First, the workers are divided into multiple collaborative candidate groups based on active time. Then, the Hungarian algorithm is used to select the optimal workers for each module from the collaborative candidate groups of each task, and the coordination candidate group replacement strategy is used to solve the assignment failure problem. Finally completing the assignment of all tasks within an assignment cycle. The experiments have shown that the proposed method increases the total utility by 25% and the success rate of distribution by 30% than the sequential assignment method. The proposed method can give a reasonable solution for software crowdsourcing task allocation based on collaborative development.