Determinants of success in crowdsourcing software development

Abstract

With the advent of digitization, recent years have witnessed a surge toward collective undertaking of production process different from traditional ways of organizing. In this vein, crowdsourcing has lent itself into a successful emerging mode of organizing and firms are increasingly using it in their value creation activities. However, despite popularity in practice, crowdsourcing has received little attention from IS scholars. Specifically, what the determinants of success in this model are remains an unexplored area of research that we strive to address in this paper. We focus on software development via crowdsourcing and drawing on studies from IS success, OSS and software development, we build a model of success that has three determinants: the characteristics of the project, the composition of the crowd and the relationship among key players. Finally, we describe our research methodology and conclude with potential contributions of our work.