Microtask programming: building software with a crowd

Abstract

Microtask crowdsourcing organizes complex work into workflows, decomposing large tasks into small, relatively independent microtasks. Applied to software development, this model might increase participation in open source software development by lowering the barriers to contribu-tion and dramatically decrease time to market by increasing the parallelism in development work. To explore this idea, we have developed an approach to decomposing programming work into microtasks. Work is coordinated through tracking changes to a graph of artifacts, generating appropriate microtasks and propagating change notifications to artifacts with dependencies. We have implemented our approach in CrowdCode, a cloud IDE for crowd development. To evaluate the feasibility of microtask programming, we performed a small study and found that a small crowd of 12 workers was able to successfully write 480 lines of code and 61 unit tests in 14.25 person-hours of time.