Hybrid sourcing: Novel combination of crowdsourcing and inner-sourcing for software developments

Abstract

Sourcing the right IT engineers is critical for project success. In recent years, two sourcing strategies have been grabbing attention: crowdsourcing and inner-sourcing. Each has their own good points and bad points. Crowdsourcing allows organizations to recruit IT engineers from outside on demand. However, organizations working on closed-source code with confidential information might be worried about security concerns (e.g., information leak). The other strategy, inner-sourcing, can make any IT engineer in an organization become a member of all projects by adopting open source software development practices. This improves the mobility of IT engineers between projects inside the organization. However, there is a limit to the types of IT engineers that one organization can have. In this report, we propose a hybrid sourcing approach. It integrates the two sourcing strategies to develop software - crowdsourcing and inner-sourcing. This approach distributes the development tasks to either software crowdsourcing or inner-sourcing according to task type. As a case study, we adopt hybrid sourcing approach for an industrial project. The project developed a web application system for a bus company. We evaluate the effectiveness and future issues of hybrid sourcing.