Characterizing the hyperspecialists in the context of crowdsourcing software development

Abstract

Companies around the world use crowdsourcing platforms to complete simple tasks, collect product ideas, and launch advertising campaigns. Recently, crowdsourcing has also been used for software development to run tests, fix small defects, or perform small coding tasks. Among the pillars upholding the crowdsourcing business model are the platform participants, as they are responsible for accomplishing the requested tasks. Since successful crowdsourcing heavily relies on attracting and retaining participants, it is essential to understand how they behave. This exploratory study aims to understand a specific contributor profile: hyperspecialists. We analyzed developers' participation on challenges in two ways. First, we analyzed the type of challenge that 664 Topcoder platform developers participated in during the first 18 months of their participation. Second, we focused on the profile of users who had more collaborations in the development challenges. After quantitative analysis, we observed that, in general, users who do not stop participating have behavioral traits that indicate hyper-specialization, since they participate in the majority of the same types of challenge. An interesting, though troubling, finding was the high dropout rate on the platform: 66% of participants discontinued their participation during the study period. The results also showed that hyperspecialization can be observed in terms of technologies required in the development challenges. We found that 60% of the 2,086 developers analyzed participated in at least 75% of challenges that required the same technology. We found hyperspecialists and non-specialists significantly differ in behavior and characteristics, including hyperspecialists' lower winning rate when compared to non-specialists.

Aligning technical knowledge to an industry domain in global software development: a systematic mapping

“…Another study [14] was conducted in order to describe individuals with hyper-specialized skills in the context of crowdsourced software development on the TopCoder platform. However, their work does not include a recommendation system that considers aligning preferred technologies with industry domains and incorporates a semantic approach.…”

“…Numerous research investigations have been conducted in the software engineering field, covering a wide range of subjects such as recommendation systems, metrics, team composition, labor market analysis, code repository evaluation, and requirement engineering complexities [8,9,10,11,12,13,14]. One of the studies [8] focused on recommendation systems specifically tailored for requirements engineering, provides valuable guidance for professionals in that field.…”

Suporte às atividades de manutenção de software em bases de dados abertas e distribuídas

“…Quando não há desenvolvedores locais disponíveis para serem recrutados, opta-se pela adoção do desenvolvimento global de software, em que participam desenvolvedores geograficamente distribuídos, com diversas especialidades. Esse modelo de negócio conhecido como crowdsourcing (De Neira et al 2018), busca fazer com que programadores engajados na busca por trabalho se conectem com tarefas de desenvolvimento.…”

“…De Neira et al (2018) elaboraram um estudo para identificação de "hiperespecialistas" em uma plataforma de desenvolvimento de software por crowdsourcing. Nessa plataforma, denominada TopCoder 1 , são disponibilizadas tarefas de manutenção e/ou desenvolvimento de software para desenvolvedores globalmente distribuídos resolverem em modalidade de competição.…”

Research on Application of Layered Technology Development Software in Cloud Computing Environment

“…The scope has been extended [4]. Today's electronic science continues to develop, people's demand for computers continues to increase, computer software functions have become more and more diverse, and the number of existing functions has continued to increase [5][6]. By using multi-level layering technology, software operations can be made more secure and flexible [7].…”