Slashdot Log In
Crowdsourcing Software Development to the Masses
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Dec 06, 2007 04:44 PM
from the not-sure-that's-wisdom-of-the-crowds dept.
from the not-sure-that's-wisdom-of-the-crowds dept.
Lucas123 writes "Computer World is running a piece on Crowdsourcing. That's a catchy term for the practice of taking a job traditionally performed by employees or a contracted company and outsourcing it to an undefined, large group of people in the form of an open call on the Web. Article author Mary Brandel views it as a viable way to develop cheap but innovative software. Sites like TopCoder and their coding competitions are becoming more popular with big name companies like Constellation Energy because programmers who take on the job are global, offering many different perspectives on any one job. 'The creativity and innovation of how people are rationalizing these designs and building components enables us to interject a perspective and approach that normally we wouldn't have access to,' Constellation's director of IT said." Is there any potential here, or is this just a buzzword bad idea?
Related Stories
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
I call it... Let's not pay people... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I call it... Let's not pay people... (Score:4, Funny)
Only morons would do it.
At least they get what they pay for.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
The companies market it as a way to "give young programmers real-life experience" and "something to use in their portfolio".
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
So there is no incentive for real programmers who already have a resume to bother. Only ameteurs and script kiddies would bother, so where is the quality code?
The idea has potential in some markets and for some industries however. I might offer to "crowdsource" for the local brothel by holding a bonking competition open to all the young ladies in my neighbourhood as a way of select
even outside programming, it's usually a scam (Score:5, Informative)
For a good early example of the opposite, recall the CDDB fiasco---lots of people submitting data that ends up owned by someone who won't let you use it except under onerous licensing terms. The rise of "Web 2.0" has basically taken CDDB-style business models and made them much more common, so it's important to make sure you aren't enabling that sort of thing that in the long term ends up working directly against your interests.
Parent
Huck Finn whitewash fence anyone? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
TopCoder isn't trying to get people develop for free. If anything, the complaint would be that TopCoder's development methodology is too expensive: payments to design winners, payments for developers, bonuses for reliability, payments for review staff, payments for architects, ongoing programs like the "digital run". I've heard estimates that TopCoder ended up spending around $500,000 on its new UML tool.
I don't do design/development work for TopCoder (although I lov
Re:I call it... Let's not pay people... (Score:4, Insightful)
There's a slight difference between giving a mega-corp some code for free so they can make more money vs. working on an open-source project which you enjoy and that benefits many folks
(You can argue that SOME opensource projects lead to companies making money via support services
- Roach
Parent
Were it so simple... (Score:2, Interesting)
It's deregulation. All utilities were basically "split" into generation and delivery. Generation owns the generators, and delivery is the wires and the customer base. The generation people sell their power to the grid - which there is the PJM power pool, and in turn the delivery side buys, for spot needs, from the grid at what's called location marginal price. The LMP is a calculated thing, it is designed to be a public price so that its transparent to all
Not Gonna Work (Score:5, Funny)
I bet this will be about as successful as my last idea, cokesourcing. I'd open my garage door in the morning and there would be piles of cocaine for anyone to walk up and snort in huge mounds. While they were there I merely encouraged them to add some code on the computers sitting in my garage.
I've never seen so many confusing drug related delusions put into comments! Luckily the comments made for a great book and that was how I, L. Ron Hubbard began Scientology!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
As someone familiar with their software development methodology, the criticism I would be most likely to level is that it's very labor intensive. It involves a large number of designers, developers, architects and reviewers - and the competitive nature of the indiv
Re: (Score:2)
That is hardly fair. Scientology is a carefully designed and executed fraud. Give credit where credit is due.
Two heads etc. (Score:4, Interesting)
"Crowdsource" = horrid UI? (Score:4, Insightful)
On one hand, you get design by committee. A UI that is not great, but just didn't offend anyone, the software equivalent of a meal at Olive Garden. Many MSFT apps have a designed by committee feel.
On the other hand you get no real UI conventions so various parts of the application look like what they are: a patchwork. Some F/OSS software has this type of design shortfall.
Sounds like a less focused version of an open source project. F/OSS embraces a certain ideal. I don't know if providing a free service for a for-profit corporation falls under that idea.
Re: (Score:2)
architecting the puzzle (Score:4, Insightful)
Something just doesn't seem right here... MobSourcing, RiotCoding, I mean CrowdSourcing. Seems like a good way to get all sorts of stolen code, easter eggs, and pretty much crappy code into your codebase.
Lets test the idea right here (Score:2, Funny)
Anyone who can turn this into Crysis 2 by noon tomorrow gets a lolipop and a free In Soviet Russia joke
DEF width = 1280
DEF height = 800
OPENCONSOLE
IF CREATESCREEN(width,height,16) 0
MESSAGEBOX NULL,"Failed to create DirectX screen","Error"
END
ENDIF
FILLSCREEN RGB(255,255,255)
sx = 0.1f
sy = 0.2f
speed = 1
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Hey, it's Daikatana! (Score:2)
Sorry, had to be done.
Tom Sawyer's paint-my-fence scheme reborn (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Ah, the irony. Think about it. Slashdot has people creating content for free (specifically the comments in the forum) that are of high value (as a whole; maybe not this specific comment!). It would be impossible, or prohibitively expensive to pay a team of experts to create the content of this forum.
One of the "Tricks" to the C
Experts-Exchange? (Score:2)
Re:Experts-Exchange? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Maintenance (Score:5, Insightful)
Building new things is great and all but any sane software engineer will understand that maintaining the software is a much harder and more complex problem than building the first version. Even if you pick the best built components, at some point later your customers are going to want a new feature or want a broken feature fixed. I don't think you can simply hold a competition to figure out who can submit the best maintenance job. Additionally, once the competitors submit their entries, they have no further obligation to work for you. So you've essentially lost the most important assets (the people that wrote the stuff) on the day you receive the finished the work. You could always have your own people maintain it but they will be much more costly than had you kept the original authors who do not need to re-learn the code.
you mean like a few days ago on /.? (Score:3, Insightful)
That's a catchy term for the practice of taking a job traditionally performed by employees or a contracted company and outsourcing it to an undefined, large group of people in the form of an open call on the Web
You mean like a few days ago when a story submitter commanded us "slashdotters" to go rifling through Microsoft's OOXML documents for them so, that IBM and friends wouldn't have to pay staffers/paralegals/lawyers to do so?
Rent-A-Coder was a disaster (Score:4, Interesting)
I put a job on Rent-A-Coder once. The job was to take an existing GPL piece of Python code that understood how to query some, but not all, of the various registrar WHOIS servers, and make it understand the output from each of them. The existing code was years out of date, but did approximately the right thing. Each registrar has a slightly different format for the same WHOIS data, so you need a collection of parsing modules, or something smart enough to do it generically. It's not a difficult problem, just time-consuming.
The code, and a test file of 1000 test domains, was provided. The statement of the problem said that all the test cases had to work. The resulting code would be re-released under the GPL.
Four programmers in succession took that job, with bids from $200 to $500 and locations from Ireland to Russia, and none of them produced any working code.
Re: (Score:2)
i second that.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Some projects I recall off the top of my head:
-Write software that will take in a
- Create a solid state disk drive for somebody's extra RAM. Willing to pay $300. Har har. I, ahem, told them I could make a prototype for $50k, plus the cost of Xilinx tools.
I've done bits of consulting, and doing projects for small, clueless companies is by far the worst job you can do as an engineer. They are technically clueless, don't understand that engineering costs money and want it done yesterday. Rentacoder and its ilk only magnify these problems, because they troll for technical people who will work for relatively nothing.
Recently, I offered to hire myself out as an embedded systems engineer at $60 an hour, and that is pretty much whoring myself out compared to what other people charge for consulting, but the Indian dude who wanted to hire me only wanted to pay $20 an hour. F off.
All I can say is, if these site works for somebody, good for them. I have bigger fish to fry. It's quite hard for me to see how this attracts any real talented people.
Parent
Caveat Emptor, but fair game. (Score:3, Interesting)
I tried it once and survived. My trick was to use it as a resource for non-experts looking to break conceptual logjams. I went into it knowing not to expect a clone to Yahoo for $1000.
All I needed was to fix an irritating spacing problem on a little website of mine. I made a point of going against the grain of the site and "overpaid" on purpose. For $100, I got 2.5 solutions (depending on if I wanted to use tables or CSS plus some tutorial PDF's
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, well, from what I understand thats a common occurrence, so don't feel bad.
Central Limit Theorem (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Not really. Democracy is fairly stable because the main reason for government instability is that, in non-participatory systems, people often have no effective way to protest unwelcome government action except for seeking overthrow of the government (making those systems unst
Re: (Score:2)
So I wonder if people feel more effective when they're offered an apparent choice, even if it's really mostly the same choice.
In advertising, they call it CGC (Score:2)
Sounds great... (Score:4, Insightful)
What every software company wants is predictability - they want to know if you typically turn out good code or poor code, then they can review accordingly. And by that I don't mean nothing, everyone has a bad day and everyone makes mistakes, but if it's the new intern you know it needs much more review. There's no way they could be just as thorough on all parts and still deliver this century. Crowdsourcing sounds to me like a lemon market [wikipedia.org], where you'd want reliable contributors rather than the fly-by-night lemon sellers. That's exactly the opposite, where you go into long-term relationships and both side want long-time commitments rather than this micromanagement.
First impression (Snow Crash) (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
When I first saw the words "Crowdsourcing Software Development" it reminded me of the coding practices of the Federal Government in Snow Crash, where Y.T.'s mother worked on a tiny piece of code with no idea of what she was actually contributing to. Basically the coders would each handle one function and know nothing of the whole. Entire departments probably wouldn't even know what they were working on as the contracts were huge and the projects enormous. It was a cool concept (actually that whole chapter on Y.T.'s mom was a great read), just hope it never pans out.
The whole Feds thread in Snow Crash was ripped off in the Matrix. Its a shame Neal Stephenson didn't get credit for it.
Crowdsourcing is the total opposite of this scenario. The way the Feds do it is pretty close to how commercial software is developed today in some large companies.
Uhmmmmm (Score:4, Funny)
You mean..
Open source?
Difference?
Hey I know, let's make up buzzwords for things that already have them. Yes, that's going to help.... I say we brick this idea.
Crowdsourcing and the CDDB debacle (Score:2)
It's just business (Score:3, Insightful)
Why pay for something when you can get it for free (even if you're only paying pennies on the dollar by outsourcing)? Comedy clubs have used this model for years with "Open Mike" nights, and media outlets have their unpaid "interns".
There is an endless supply of desperate, talented people who will do anything for free in the hope that their gifts will get them noticed by an employer. Employers, of course, are quick to exploit this reservoir of free talent without mercy or restraint.
High abuse potential? (Score:3, Insightful)
As others have (accurately) pointed out, this is also little more than a way to be lazy about doing a job, and not caring if it's done right as long as your company gets paid for it. What benefit do those actually writing your code get for their efforts?
There are right ways and wrong ways to go about doing any task. This strikes me as just plain wrong. I certainly wouldn't want to do any project I come up with this way. It would be like Boeing throwing open their design process to the world, and saying "OK, you design our next plane for us, but we get to use any idea you come up with and not pay you." Ludicrous, hmmm?
PHB speak for "Cheap Foreign labor" (Score:3, Insightful)
This is PHB speak for "cheap foreign labor". I recognize phrases similar to this from pro-H1B (visa-worker) business lobbyist websites. "Many different perspectives" is just fluffy "global community" talk to hide the real i$$ue.
MBA buzzword bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
Overstock.com Divulges Secret To Its Cyber Monday Success [informationweek.com]
Their secret? They hired engineers. I shit you not, they were a
this is just a bad idea (Score:2)
Yet another way to try to use the OSS community (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)