Title
Barriers Faced by Newcomers to Software-Crowdsourcing Projects
Abstract
Crowdsourcing distributes a task to a large network of people--the crowd--through an open call. Newcomers (those attempting to make their first successful contribution) are especially important because they are a source of new ideas and promote a sustainable number of developers. So, newcomers should be encouraged to be active participants in software crowdsourcing. However, newcomers can have difficulty winning algorithm competitions. In addition, six types of barriers can hinder them: lack of documentation, poor task management, problems understanding code structure or architecture, information overload, poor platform usability, and the language barrier. Fortunately, ways exist to minimize the barriers, including consistent documentation, well-structured source code, recommending tasks that are appropriate for newcomers, and assigning tasks to newcomers that let them derive more benefits for themselves. This article is part of a special issue on Crowdsourcing for Software Engineering.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1109/MS.2017.32
IEEE Software
Keywords
Field
DocType
Crowdsourcing,Documentation,Usability,Software engineering,Open source software,Testing
Information overload,Task management,Systems engineering,Software engineering,Source code,Crowdsourcing,Computer science,Usability,Knowledge management,Documentation,Crowdsourcing software development,Software development
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
34
2
0740-7459
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
8
0.59
8
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Alexandre Lazaretti Zanatta1122.73
Igor Steinmacher252546.19
Leticia Machado3305.30
Cleidson R.B. de Souza462352.73
Rafael Prikladnicki584086.35