“Crowdsourcing” for software projects is older than the internet (BBS anyone?).  But there’s been a recent surge of interest in creating new ways to crowdsource everything from taxis to art, which in turn has returned focus to crowdsourcing software. In the most recent issue of IEEE Software, Editor, Christof Ebert, attempts to tackle the diverse business of “Collaborative Software Development Platforms for Crowdsourcing.” Because crowdsourcing is another buzz phrase that can apply to a wide range of activities and platforms, the article feels spread thin and misses many great platforms.

I remember when we just called it outsourcing, and it had a dirty connotation because it was open to anyone anywhere online, and it sent jobs out of your community. It’s always hard to compete for a job when programmers in another country will do it for a fraction of the price. Platforms such as Freelancer and GetACoder that work from job bids are notorious for attracting cheap programmers and designers and frequently lead to businesses wasting time and money for poorly developed software. The IEEE Software article mentions three different platforms that try to combat the cheap code trap with competitions and using known talent. TopCoder is one of the most popular software competition sites, but it does not provide much in the way of collaboration or organizational tools for managing projects. The other two are actually not good sources for crowdsourcing software: CoFundos is another bidding site with no updates since 2012, while Genius Rocket is an ad agency that has a pool of designers.

I’m surprised that the article began by mentioning Linux and then ignored the successful crowdsourcing models that spawned from it. Much better platforms/models can be found from many current open software groups such as Ubuntu, Gnome, LibraOffice and Gimp. Models such as Gimp and Ubuntu use cash to reward programmers who contribute good code.

Many of the collaborative tools mentioned later in the article (PaaS, OSS platforms and Collaborative testing platforms) leave much to be desired—services that are more focused on sharing and publishing rather than collaboration. Cross-task coordination and team organization (project management) are the real issues when multiple people work on a project. In the article, there’s no mention of crowdsourcing bug-trackers (Bugzilla), Q&A Sites (Stack Overflow), revision control systems or source code management platforms (GitHub). As I mentioned, crowdsourcing has been around for a while now and it is still evolving, but there are tools available beyond what this article covered.  I’ve yet to see a silver bullet when it comes to collaborative software (groupware) for software development due to the special concerns that each project presents. But with enough research and planning, a project can be wrangled with a combination of platforms that already exist. Godspeed to all of you project managers who are looking into crowdsourcing.