SURVEY OF CROWDSOURCING IN SOFTWARE ENGINEERING: MODELS, OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES

Almost surreptitiously, crowdsourcing has entered software engineering practice. In-house development, contracting, and outsourcing still dominate, but many a software development project today uses crowdsourcing for a variety of purposes, whether it is to squash bugs, test their software, or gather alternative designs for a new user interface. While the overall impact has been mundane thus far, crowdsourcing has the potential to lead to fundamental and disruptive changes in how software will be developed in the future. This paper explores the models of crowdsourcing that have been applied to software development to date, outlines the exciting opportunities that exist, and articulates a series of challenges that must be overcome for crowdsourcing software development to truly reach its potential