Abstract
In this chapter we investigate the crowdsourcing phenomenon through a case study of a multinational company who embarked on a significant crowdsourcing software development initiative. Most studies aim to explain crowdsourcing by describing successful cases (e.g., Brabham 2008); as a result, there has been little attention to the challenges that may arise. Further research is therefore needed to better understand the limits of crowdsourcing software development. This chapter presents an in-depth industry case study of crowdsourcing software development at a multinational corporation. The goal is to shed light on the key issues in crowdsourcing that are relevant to software development. The study reveals a number of challenges that the case study organization encountered. In previous work (Stol and Fitzgerald 2014a, b), we drew on the crowdsourcing literature to synthesize a set of six cues which have particular relevance in a crowdsourcing software development context:
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http://www.topcoder.com/whatiseoi/ (accessed 5 Oct 2012)
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Ågerfalk, P.J., Fitzgerald, B., Stol, KJ. (2015). Crowdsourcing. In: Software Sourcing in the Age of Open. SpringerBriefs in Computer Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17266-8_4
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