Barriers to crowdsource software development: evaluating the intertwined effects

Abstract

Cloud computing has changed the application development landscape. Using a cloud to outsource software development to a crowd of developers is an emerging area. While on one hand, developing software through crowdsourcing has merits of providing diverse innovative solutions with no investment in the manpower, on the other hand, such a creative task is constraint by the barriers to successful implementation. In this work, we identify and report the barriers to crowdsource cloud application development. We use the decision making trial and evaluation laboratory technique to analyse and determine the direct and indirect intertwined effects amongst the identified barriers. From the results, we infer that granular nature of changing technology, lack of trust on crowdsourced platforms, lack of understanding on intellectual property issues and security apprehensions are classified as the root causes that affects coordination and collaboration amongst the contestants of the crowdsourced platform, among other barriers.