Towards Adopting Alternative Workforce for Software Engineering

This paper proposes an approach for adopting alternative workforce in an organization. Alternative workforce refers to a pool of workers who work for the organization as contract workers or as crowd workers for a set of specific tasks or duration. Adoption of crowd workers as an alternative workforce is gaining a lot of attention these days. However, it is still not widely adopted by big organizations because of the concerns related to quality, timeliness, and confidentiality. A partial adoption of crowd workforce is a natural next step to leverage the benefits of crowdsourcing. The above partial adoption creates a hybrid workforce structure where different type of workers, such as full time employees, contractors, and crowd workers, work for the organization. A number of challenges need to be addressed for the above model to succeed. For instance, hiring right workers, establishing a proper collaboration among the workers distributed across geographies, and assessing the workers for confidentiality and privacy. This paper proposes a platform that alleviates some of the above challenges. We present a pilot performed on the platform and initial experiences gained from the adoption of the platform.