Collaborative Behavior and Winning Challenges in Competitive Software Crowdsourcing
Leticia Santos Machado, Ricardo Rodrigo M. Melo, Cleidson R. B. de Souza, Rafael Prikladnicki · Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · 2021
Software Crowdsourcing (SW CS) allows a requester to increase the speed of its software development efforts by submitting a task to be performed by the crowd. SW CS is usually structured around software platforms, which are used by crowd members to identify a task suited for them, gather information about this task, and finally, submit a solution for it. In competitive software crowdsourcing, members of the crowd independently create solutions while competing against each other by monetary rewards for task completion. While competition usually reduces collaboration, in this paper, we investigated how crowd members create a collaborative behavior during programming challenges using online forums to help each other, share useful information, and discuss important documents and artifacts. We also investigated different collaborative behaviours by crowd members and and how this collaboration is associated with crowd members' improved outcome in the challenges. These results are based on analysis of the online forums from Topcoder, one of the largest competitive SW CS platforms