Crowdsourcing is a model in which an individual or organization obtains goods, services, including the idea of a large group of participants (crowds). Crowdsourcing is popular because it is supported by the internet era, making it easy for people to virtually contribute to a large project.
Crowdsourcing has been widely used to help software development, especially in the process of requirements elicitations. Crowdsourcing approaches can also reduce communication gaps and domain knowledge-related understanding between software developers and users by engaging crowds during the requirement phase.
Method and results
In this study, we proposed crowdsourcing-based systems as a tool for collecting software requirements. Although traditional methods are sufficient to manage software requirements in the requirement elicitations process, crowdsourcing systems can provide information from various sources, improve efficiency, and improve system analysts’ understanding of problem domains.
The study was conducted by building crowdsourcing applications to collect software requirements. Applications are designed considering stakeholders involved in managing software requirements with the crowdsourcing platform. The system has been built on a web platform using the Python programming language with the Django framework and SQLite database to make it easier for users to access the system.
Software requirement collection emulates performed to evaluate the system and see the impact of crowdsourcing implementation on the software requirement collection process. System evaluation is done by testing the system to determine the validity of inputs and outputs produced, then continued discussing the process of requirements elicitation conducted through crowdsourcing.
The results support the initial hypothesis that crowdsourcing can give system analysts a broad perspective and efficiency in terms of cost and time to understand the domain of the problem compared to traditional methods. Feedback from the crowdsourcing system to acquire requirements found that users strongly agreed that crowdsourcing provides benefits in cost, education, flexibility, scalability, and global workers. However, serious attention is given to intellectual property, quality, uncertainty, feedback, and collaboration.
Author: Indra Kharisma Raharjana
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