The verification approach to complex tasks' functional specification in software crowdsourcing

Software crowdsourcing is an emerging approach that involves delegating varieties of tasks to a decentralized, multi-scale and unknown workforce. Preparing a complex development job for crowdsourcing markets requires careful attention to workflow design, the process of decomposing job into multiple subtasks. This paper presents a general-purpose approach to verify the complex task's decomposition scheme and its functional specification. Our meta-model adopts the structured object-oriented formal language (SOFL) to accurately describe the task decomposition scheme, avoiding the fuzziness and ambiguity with the natural language. Based on this meta-model, we present a formal approach to verifying the functional specification of task decomposition. This approach can verify the decomposition specification of each subtask's internal inconsistencies and determine whether it is consistent with its original task. We describe our meta-model, verification approach and a case study on a software crowdsourcing task that demonstrates the effectiveness of the approach.