Crowdsourced software design platforms: Critical assessment

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.