Analysis of the Key Factors for Software Quality in Crowdsourcing Development: An Empirical Study on TopCoder.com

Crowdsourcing is a distributed problem-solving and production model. It takes advantage of the internet technology, helps enterprises save cost and improve efficiency. However, uncertain quality is a significant challenge for crowdsourcing. On the basis of the existing literatures, this paper proposes 23 software quality factors from two aspects: platform and project. By using multiple regression analysis on the data of one of the most successful software crowdsourcing platforms TopCoder.com, this paper analyzes the impact of the factors on software quality and identifies six key factors, including the average quality score of the platform, the number of contemporary projects, the length of component document, the number of registered developers, the maximum rating of submitted developers, and the design score. According to the result, this paper suggests four aspects for enterprises to improve software quality: choosing the prosperous period of platform to post a project, reducing the scale of projects, attracting more and higher skillful developers to participate, and improving software design score.