An Empirical Study on Competitive Crowdsource Software Development: Motivating and Inhibiting Factors

Crowdsourcing is gaining more and more popularity among the academic and industrial community. Organizations are adopting this technological advent and increasingly crowdsourcing their tasks to the unknown individuals. However, in the context of competitive crowdsourcing software development (CCSD), crowdsourcing is still unexplored. Too little is presently known about what intricate developers to participate in crowdsourcing software development competitions. Most importantly, what kind of developers are more likely to participate? Such open questions remain to be explored. To this end, in this paper, we present the results of an empirical study conducted to investigate what motivates software developers to participate in CCSD and what inhibits software developers to participate in such competitions. An online questionnaire is sent out to more than 300 crowdsource software participants, of which 113 return valid responses. It is also sent to more than 150 industry practitioners, of which 75 return valid responses. The results suggest that the monetary rewards are not significantly important to motivate software developers to participate in CCSD. Instead, learning, social contacts, and peer recognition are more important. Besides the survey, we also analyze the historical data collected from one of the most popular software crowdsourcing platforms. The analysis results reveal that the Pareto principle holds for CCSD as well, and 0.9% of the participants win 86% competitions. The results support the premise that CCSD market is still at an early stage. Most of the professional software engineers do not participate seriously in crowdsourcing software development. Therefore, many crowdsourced tasks, especially complex tasks, may fail to receive any satisfying submission. These findings are worthwhile for the crowdsourcing platforms and companies who want to outsource their software development tasks to the CCSD platforms.