Crowdsourcing Software Development to the Masses 122
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?
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.
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The companies market it as a way to "give young programmers real-life experience" and "something to use in their portfolio".
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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.
Huck Finn whitewash fence anyone? (Score:4, Insightful)
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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
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It's the peak days that matter.
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With regulation, they are only allowed a fixed amount of profit. If they make more than that, then they have to reduce rates or give refunds. With deregulation, if they make more profit, they keep it.
Layne
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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
Reply to AC (Score:2)
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True. It's been a feature of content development firms since before the PC, too. I remember reading about how Heinlein was going to submit his first short story to one of the early SF magazines, who offered a cash prize in a contest for the best SF story. He looked around and found the going rate per word for regular submissions in a competitor's magazine was considerably higher than that cash prize, so he submitted the story there instead.
It's a perception thing, I think -- yo
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Topcoder is a competition, which is split into algorithm, software design and software components:
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The fact that you don't derive immediate economic benefit from any one particular project doesn't mean that project won't improve your economic standing in a different manner.
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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
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Probably depends on the size of the company. A small company with a single product that finds itself competing with a new free version of it, will tend to have to shed developers as the amount it can successfully charge for it diminishes. And job losses can depress wages, due to supply and demand dynam
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!
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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
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That is hardly fair. Scientology is a carefully designed and executed fraud. Give credit where credit is due.
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TopCoder has nothing to do with people accomplishing work. It's a competition, nothing more.
Wrong. TopCoder is a gateway for many corporations to hire globally available programmers and designers. Most Algorithm matches bring a corporate sponsor there to recruit top-performing competitors. In addition to Algorithm competitions, there are Design and Development rounds that let TopCoder members design and develop software (or bits of software) that TopCoder actually uses and sells to companies.
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.
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Come on, you don't *really* think MS crowdsourced Vista, do you?
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Browsing through one example a few years ago as an undergrad (rent-a-coder) it was amazing how a copmany can survive where 90% of the jobs are for illegal purposes
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
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Sorry, couldn't resist.
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In Soviet Russia the crowd sources YOU!
oops. gave the prize away early. Now I'll expect a DirectX11 wrapper for Windows 2000 on top of the initial assignment. Hurry up. Time is code! +P
Hey, it's Daikatana! (Score:2)
Sorry, had to be done.
Tom Sawyer's paint-my-fence scheme reborn (Score:2)
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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)
No guarantee of getting paid even if you "win" (Score:1)
and
"Who's to say that a company that doesn't pick your solution as the 'winner' won't nevertheless take your idea and run with it anyway? InnoCentive handles this by requiring all participants to sign an agreement protecting confidential information, and it prevents third parties from seeing and stealing others' ideas by allowing only the organization t
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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.
Another way to take advantage of the populace (Score:1)
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.
Is this the same group? (Score:1)
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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.
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
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Oh, well, from what I understand thats a common occurrence, so don't feel bad.
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I don't know much about that site, but I assume that you didn't have to pay, then. So truly you got what you paid for (pay zero, get zero). What a hassle though. Did it cost you anything (besides your time)? Listing fees, maybe? Just curious.
I do think there are talented, low cost people out there. Especially in (don't shoot me) India and Russia.
Central Limit Theorem (Score:3, Interesting)
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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
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So I wonder if people feel more effective when they're offered an apparent choice, even if it's really mostly the same choice.
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You still have far more parties represented in Parliament than the Americans do. The entire House is either Democrat or Republican, and the Senate has exactly two Independents who caucus with the Democrats. Zero third party representation at all.
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Winner-take-all districts, sure.
Very many modern democracies don't apportion their national legislature that way, and those that don't have measurably higher public satisfaction with government, overall, than those that do.
The UK, like the US, use
In advertising, they call it CGC (Score:2)
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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.
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What I find misleading in the article are the examples given where crowdsourcing works. The examples given are content consuming things. You don't need any expertise to read a wikipedia article, or laugh at a whole bunch of pictures someone gave away. S
First impression (Snow Crash) (Score:2)
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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)
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Umm, last I checked, anyone writing a freeware app could use Gracenote for free. So what are you talking about?
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Re:Crowdsourcing and the OpenDivX debacle (Score:1)
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.
Endless supply of desperate, talented people? (Score:1)
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Sorry, I forgot to mention that some people are such incredible dicks even loving mothers would rather watch their children starve than work for them. These people typically have trouble finding employees, interns and sometimes friends. Even their family pets run away to the SPCA to be euthanized. I don't suppose (cough) you know anybody like that (cough)?
And the planet would be Earth. Where are you from, by the way?
Please god no (Score:1)
Sometimes it's not just a buzzword, it's also a bad idea.
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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?
Crowd VS Community (Score:1)
This is my first post on Slashdot but I had to answer this one.
Actually, I'm quite amazed that the guys behind TopCoder manages to run a company on the concept of a permanent competition. I am myself in the business of "crowd-sourcing" development on the web since 3 years. I cofounded a company named The Coding Machine ( http://www.thecodingmachine.com/ [thecodingmachine.com]) and when we founded it, the first model that we thought about was the model applied by TopCoder.
But we went on a different model. The rational behind
Bugs... (Score:1)
Would be interesting if there is a massive bug found and half the team was unavailable at there real jobs and could not find time to design a possible fix.
I guess this "open source model" could never be used for a serious application which required rapid response work if a bug was found.
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Open source works, because enough people working on it will adopt it as their own project. Crowdsourcing development doesn't have that incentive. If I write code for a competition, don't get paid for working, and somebody else is profiting from that code, why should I take my time to fix bugs when I'm otherwise busy?
If you want people to commit to software projects without actually paying them, you need to make it true open source/free software. When money gets involved, the software and any problems
Really Old Stuff (Score:1)
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)
Interesting (Score:2)
catchy
adj., -ier, -iest.
1. Utterly moronic: a catchy term for the practice of outsourcing a job to an undefined, large group of people.
Good idea (Score:2)
Perhaps it time those old visual programming ideas were implemented on the internet....
An Extremely Foolish Form of Outsourcing (Score:1)
This appears to be a "brillant" idea from some meathead MBA who thinks FOSS works by magic.
These are the same people who think that outsourcing IT is a good idea. I've seen it from both sides, and I have never seen an outsourcing arrangement (regardless of national boundaries) work well.
I'm not talking about bringing in contractors to help; generally, a good contractor will become as much a part of the team as the empoyees, just with different constraints. I'm talking about "Hey, Big Freaking Imper
A good way to support Open Source projects (Score:1)
Bad news... (Score:1)
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If you break software up into little pieces with different people working on each, you need to (a) give them explicit instructions as to what that software should do so it can integrate with the rest of the project and (b) be able to verify that it does exactly that.
As others have pointed out, code review and testing is difficult and time-consuming. In order to ensure correctness EFFICIENTLY, you probably need to automate the verification proces. That is, you need to w