Opportunities and Challenges of Crowdsourcing in Addis Ababa Software Companies
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Date
2016-06
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Main Objective: The main objective of this study was to investigate the opportunities and challenges of crowdsourcing in software companies from software developer (crowd worker) and company (requester) perspective.
Methodology: quantitative study was conducted on 82 software developers and 11 software companies’ managers and qualitative study was conducted on conveniently selected 5 software company owners. Data collection was done by using questionnaire and semi-structured interview.
Result: crowdsourcing has opportunities to share knowledge, to get reward, to help others and crowdsourcing is highly flexible for software developers. Moreover, crowdsourcing has also opportunities for software companies to improve software quality, to get creative solutions, to save time and cost, to get resource and highly skillful worker which is not available in the company at any time, easy to adopt, complex tasks can be solved and intellectual property or copy right is protected in crowdsourcing.
Crowdsourcing has its own challenges such as lack of awareness of crowdsourcing, limited information about tasks and employer in crowdsourcing platforms, lack of time to participate, questions are not clearly describe in most crowdsourcing platforms, low internet access, privacy and creative works are unprotected for software developers and also crowdsourcing has challenges for software companies such as task decomposition, communication problem, planning and scheduling of tasks is very critical to complete tasks on time, majority result may not be relevant, difficult to control the qualities of the work, attractive payment or reward are required to retain skillful crowd, lack of legal and regulatory framework.
Conclusion: crowdsourcing are very useful tool for software companies but there is low awareness of crowdsourcing in software companies. Because of that crowdsourcing is not widely used in Addis Ababa software companies. The findings also highlight the opportunities and challenges of crowdsourcing in software companies.
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Keywords
crowdsourcing, requesters, crowd worker, platforms, software companies