Understanding Risk in Software Crowdsourcing: A Preliminary Taxonomy

Abstract

Software crowdsourcing (SC) is booming as a popular paradigm for rapid solution development. However, unique characteristics of this emerging paradigm, such as external resources and black-box nature of crowdsourced processes, introduce inherent risk to crowdsourcing. This paper aims at developing better understanding towards risk in SC. To that end, we conduct a literature review of 36 relevant articles, and propose a preliminary taxonomy of SC risk including 13 risk types. These 13 risk types are organized with a two-dimensional, processes vs. entities, structure. For each risk, its description and cause / consequence are introduced. Analysis of possible reasons and practical mitigation suggestions are also offered for crowdsourcing practitioners to better cope with risks. The preliminary results will help both requesters and platforms to be alert to risks by understanding them, so as to ensure the achievement of expected benefits of SC. *Corresponding Author: Dr. Yong Wang, Department of Computer Science and Technology, Ocean University of China, 238 Songling Rd, Laoshan Qu, Qingdao Shi, China; E-mail: wangyong@ouc.edu.cn Citation: Yu D, Yang Y, Wang Y (2020) Understanding Risk in Software Crowdsourcing: A Preliminary Taxonomy. Int J Comput Softw Eng 5: 155. doi: https://doi.org/10.15344/2456-4451/2020/155 Copyright: © 2020 Yu et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. On the one hand, SC processes share some common risk factors with traditional software methodologies. For example, requirement risk may occur in both traditional software methodologies and SC, and the common risk factor in requirements is unclarity and ambiguity. On the other hand, SC also exhibits some special risk characteristics. It is constantly subject to uncertain changes due to the loss of control and visibility to individual worker's behaviors. For example, SC tasks are registered by anonymous workers from all over the world, who may submit plagiarized code [28] or poor-quality solutions [22]. Such risks may threaten task success. In addition, there are some common misconceptions among software practitioners. On the optimistic side, some people believe that crowdsourcing is a better way to go without worrying about the risk. On the realistic side, some companies experience pushing back due to low task quality [22], task starvation [10], and employees' reluctance (i.e., turbulence) [9]. Therefore, there is an essential need for a synthesized body of knowledge in order to support more informed risk management in SC practice. To that end, this paper aims at exploring and extracting special risk items and reasons in the context of SC, in order to support managers to discern and manage their SC project risks in a more effective manner. Based on the existing literature review, this paper proposes a preliminary taxonomy of SC risk including 13 risk types. These are organized with a two-dimensional, processes vs. entities, structure. For each risk, its description and cause / consequence are presented. Analysis of possible reasons and practical mitigation suggestions are also offered for crowdsourcing practitioners to better cope with risks. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 introduces the background and related work to set the context for following passage. Section 3 introduces the research methodology of this paper. Section 4 analyzes the results of the literature review. Section 5 presents the proposed risk taxonomy in SC with 13 risk items. Section 6 provides suggestions to requesting clients and crowdsourcing platforms. Section 7 concludes this paper with future work. International Journal of Computer & Software Engineering Daiwei Yu1, Ye Yang2 and Yong Wang1* 1Department of Computer Science and Technology, Ocean University of China, Qingdao, China 2School of Systems and Enterprises, Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken NJ, USA Int J Comput Softw Eng IJCSE, an open access journal ISSN: 2456-4451 Volume 5. 2020. 155 Yu et al., Int J Comput Softw Eng 2020, 5: 155 https://doi.org/10.15344/2456-4451/2020/155