A Vision of Crowd Development

Abstract

Crowdsourcing has had extraordinary success in solving a diverse set of problems, ranging from digitization of libraries and translation of the Internet, to scientific challenges such as classifying elements in the galaxy or determining the 3D shape of an enzyme. By leveraging the power of the masses, it is feasible to complete tasks in mere days and sometimes even hours, and to take on tasks that were previously impossible because of their sheer scale. Underlying the success of crowdsourcing is a common theme - the microtask. By breaking down the overall task at hand into microtasks providing short, self-contained pieces of work, work can be performed independently, quickly, and in parallel - enabling numerous and often untrained participants to chip in. This paper puts forth a research agenda, examining the question of whether the same kinds of successes that microtask crowdsourcing is having in revolutionizing other domains can be brought to software development. That is, we ask whether it is possible to push well beyond the open source paradigm, which still relies on traditional, coarse-grained tasks, to a model in which programming proceeds through microtasks performed by vast numbers of crowd developers.