Challenges and Their Resolution in Crowdsourcing Based Team Formation

Abstract

Software development activity has gained several innovations in 21st century; the phenomena like outsourcing, global software development and crowdsourcing are not only being researched but also being practiced with great success. This paper discusses the team formation issues in software crowdsourcing paradigm. In crowdsourcing, software products are developed by team members who are geographically separated from one another. Teamwork can be successful if hired workers are professional and they effectively collaborate with one another, which is a key challenge. Team formation is difficult, especially at a large scale. This research is carried out in three steps: systematic literature review (SLR), survey and expert evaluation. SLR is further detailed as planning review, process execution review and results. Through SLR, forty raw challenges were identified, which were reviewed by experts to select main challenges. A survey was conducted on the resolution of main challenges, taking suggestions about resolution of the former. The validation of the challenges was performed on the basis of expert reviews. Through validation, it was ensured that the identified challenges had consistent and correct naming conventions and terminologies within existing state of knowledge.