Competence, Collaboration, and Time Management: Barriers and Recommendations for Crowdworkers

Abstract

Software crowdsourcing development requires a continuous influx of crowdworkers for their continuity. Crowdworkers should be encouraged to play an important role in the online communities by being active members, but they face difficulties when attempting to participate. For this reason, in this paper, we investigated the difficulties that crowdworkers face in crowdsourcing software development platforms. To achieve this, we conducted a study relying on multiple data sources and research methods including literature review, peer review, field study, and procedures of grounded theory. We observed that crowdworkers face many barriers – related to competence, collaboration, and time management – when making their contributions in software crowdsourcing development, which can result in dropouts. The main contributions of this paper are: a) empirical identification of barriers faced by crowdsourcing software development crowdworkers, and b) recommendations on how to minimize the barriers.