Can microtask programming work in industry?

Abstract

A critical issue in software development projects in IT service companies is finding the right people at the right time. By enabling assignments of tasks to people to be more fluid, the use of crowdsourcing approaches within a company offers a potential solution to this challenge. Inside a company, as multiple system development projects are ongoing separately, developers with slack time on one project might use this time to contribute to other projects. In this paper, we report on a case study of the application of crowdsourcing within an industrial web application system development project in a large telecommunications company. Developers worked with system specifications which were organized into a set of microtasks, offering a set of short and self-contained descriptions. When crowd workers in other projects had slack time, they fetched and completed microtasks. Our results offer initial evidence for the potential value of microtask programming in increasing the fluidity of team assignments within a company. Crowd contributors to the project were able to onboard and contribute to a new project in less than 2 hours. After onboarding, the crowd workers were together able to successfully implement a small program which contained only a small number of defects. Interview and survey data gathered from project participants revealed that crowd workers reported that they perceived onboarding costs to be reduced and did not experience issues with the reduced face to face communication, but experienced challenges with motivation. CCS CONCEPTS • Software and its engineering → Software development techniques; Software development methods.

Microtasking Activities in Crowdsourced Software Development: A Systematic Literature Review

“…These tasks related to the translation of content form one language to another. Furthermore, tasks related to conversion of a file to any other format also lie in this [45], [6], [59], [38], [23], [44], [46], [51] [23], [44], [46], [51], [21], [48], [53], [6], [3], [52], [59], [60], [58] Information finding These microtasks are related to general information e.g., finding the information of an organization which is situated in any other country, identify authentic and unpaid Facebook pages which are providing services related to bitcoin.…”