Leveraging Crowdsourcing in Cloud Application Development

The emergence of crowdsourcing has enabled workforce seekers to delegate various tasks to the unknown public to accomplish. Crowdsourcing serves in Software development where projects often fail due to the inability to find and allocate expertise. In cloud application (i.e. Software as Service – [SaaS]) development, projects severely suffer from shortage of expert developers due to its recent and rapid evolution. Therefore, many software manufacturers resort to crowdsourcing to find and recruit experts in SaaS development. To address this need, we conducted a survey of SaaS crowdsourcing to identify its challenges and to explore the crowdsourcing facilities that support addressing these challenges. Furthermore, we review two widespread existing approaches for software development crowdsourcing and propose a novel approach. Additionally, we discuss the challenges in SaaS development crowdsourcing and evaluate our proposed approach for its ability to address these challenges. Finally, we provide future adopters with a list of attributes to assist them in choosing the proper crowdsourcing service. This paper aims to provide a state-of-the-art assessment of the work carried out so far in applications development crowdsourcing and proposes recommendations to enhance it.