Crowdsourcing (eBook)

This book presents the latest research on the software crowdsourcing approach to develop large and complex software in a cloud-based platform. It develops the fundamental principles, management organization and processes, and a cloud-based infrastructure to support this new software development approach. The book examines a variety of issues in software crowdsourcing processes, including software quality, costs, diversity of solutions, and the competitive nature of crowdsourcing processes. Furthermore, the book outlines a research roadmap of this emerging field, including all the key technology and management issues for the foreseeable future. Crowdsourcing, as demonstrated by Wikipedia and Facebook for online web applications, has shown promising results for a variety of applications, including healthcare, business, gold mining exploration, education, and software development. Software crowdsourcing is emerging as a promising solution to designing, developing and maintaining software. Preliminary software crowdsourcing practices and platforms, including Apple's App Store and TopCoder, demonstrate the advantages of crowdsourcing in terms of software ecosystem expansion and product quality improvement.

Professor Wei Li is a member of the Chinese Science Academy. He is the director of State Key Lab of Software Environment Development, and vice-chair of the Chinese Institue of Electronic. He has been president of Beihang University from 2002 to 2009. Currently he is serving as Editor-in-Chief for 'Science China - Information Sciences', Editor for 'Journal of Computer Science and Technology' and 'International Journal of Advanced Software Technology'.

Professor Michael N. Huhns is the Chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of South Carolina, USA. Besides being a Fellow of the IEEE, Dr. Huhns is a member of Sigma Xi, Tau Beta Pi, Eta Kappa Nu, ACM, Upsilon Pi Epsilon, and AAAI. He is the author of over 200 technical papers in machine intelligence and an editor of the books 'Distributed Artificial Intelligence' Vol. I and II and 'Readings in Agents'. Dr. Huhns is an associate editor for the 'Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems' and 'IEEE Internet Computing.

Dr. Wei-Tek Tsai is professor at the School of Computing, Informatics & Decision Systems Engineering at Arizona State University. He is associate editor of 'Service-Oriented Computing and Applications.

Wenjun Wu is a Professor in the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the Beihang University. He was previously a research scientist from 2006 to 2010, at the Computation Institute (CI) at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory. He was a technical staff and post-doctoral research associate from 2002 to 2006, at the Community Grids Lab at the Indiana University. He received his BS, Master and PhD degrees in Computer Science from Beihang University in 1994, 1997 and 2001, respectively. He published over seventy peer-review papers on journals and conferences. His research interests include: crowdsourcing, online education, cloud computing, eScience and cyberinfrastructure.