Surveying developer knowledge and interest in code smells through online freelance marketplaces

This paper discusses the use of freelance marketplaces to conduct a survey amongst professional developer's about specific software engineering phenomena, in our case their knowledge and interest in code smells and their detection/removal. We present the context and motivation of our research, and the idea of using freelance marketplaces for conducting studies involving software professionals. Next, we describe the design of the survey and the specifics on the selected freelance marketplace (i.e., Freelancer.com). Finally, we discuss why freelance markets constitute a feasible and advantageous approach for conducting user evaluations that involve large numbers of software professionals, and what challenges such an approach may entail.