Toward Microtask Crowdsourcing Software Design Work

The use of crowdsourcing as an approach for performing software engineering work is slowly but surely gaining foothold. Different models of crowdsourcing, however, have had varying levels of success to date. This paper contributes to the discussion a preliminary exploration of microtask crowdsourcing and its potential to generate design solutions. We specifically report on an experiment with Amazon Mechanical Turk workers, who each provided one or more solution alternatives to a small, partial user interface design problem. Early analysis of the results indicates that: (1) it is feasible for a crowd to generate a broad range of alternative solutions, (2) quality of those solutions varies considerably, and (3) the task, despite being small, is seen as difficult by many workers.