Software crowdsourcing for developing Software-as-a-Service
Xiaolan XU1,2,Wenjun WU2,*(),Ya WANG3,Yuchuan WU2
1. Chinese Institute of Electronics, Beijing 100036, China 2. State Key Laboratory of Software Development Environment, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China 3. School of Software Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China
Recently software crowdsourcing has become a viable development paradigm for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) ecosystems. TopCoder, one of the largest competitive programming communities, enables enterprises to tap into its global talent pool and crowdsource a variety of SaaS development tasks including requirement analysis, architecture design, code, and testing. Many researchers have proposed auction-based modelling methods to characterize general software crowdsourcing. But there are few papers on the comprehensive analysis of SaaS crowdsourcing process and developer community.
This paper introduces a holistic analysis framework to model the SaaS-oriented software crowdsourcing from two dimensions: individual behavior in crowdsourcing contests and collective competition in the community. The framework includes a game-theoretical model to describe the competitive nature of software crowdsourcing process. Moreover, the framework defines a competition network to characterize the topological properties of a crowdsourcing community for SaaS development. The analysis of this model indicates that the success of a competitive software crowdsourcing project essentially depends upon the networks of key participants with sufficient skills and dedication for the project. This is validated by a large historical data collected from the Top-Coder website over a ten-year period.
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