Factors influencing sustainability aspects in crowdsourced software development: A systematic literature review

Abstract

Crowdsource software development has become more and more popular in recent years in the software industry. Crowdsourcing is an open-call technique for outsourcing tasks to a broad and undefined crowd. Crowdsourcing provides numerous advantages including reduced costs, fast project completion, talent identification, diversity of solutions, top-quality, and access to problem-solving creativity. Despite of the benefits gained from crowdsourcing, there are numerous issues like lack of experienced workers, lack of confidentiality, copyright issues, software sustainability, and so forth. There is also less focus on the long-term sustainability of software development because of new ideas emerging in crowdsourcing software development. Furthermore, in literature, lack of guidelines towards sustainable software crowdsourcing is highlighted as one of the limitations in the software standards. This study aims to identify the factors that influence sustainability aspects in crowdsourced software development. We have conducted a systematic literature review for identification of these factors. In this paper, we present findings of the systematic literature review in the form of a list of 11 factors extracted from a sample of 45 finally selected papers. Among these factors, six of the factors are ranked as critical factors. These critical factors are “Lack of coding standard in documentation,” “Use of popular programming tools,” “Crowd Lack of knowledge and awareness about sustainability,” “Energy-efficient coding,” “Lack of awareness about sustainable software engineering practices,” and “Lack of coordination/communication between client and crowd.”