Microtasking Activities in Crowdsourced Software Development: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

With the utilization of crowdsourcing as a problem-solving approach, software industry has progressed tremendously in recent few years. It is a powerful approach which supports distributed human intelligence to solve complex problems in the field of software development, machine learning, linguistics, medical, interpretation and other considerable fields of study. Different models of crowdsourcing have been used depending on the nature of required outcome of the task, and have had varying levels of success to date. Microtasking is one of the lucrative models of crowdsourcing which penetrated the problem-solving strategy by facilitating the decomposition of complex tasks into short and self-contained microtasks which can be performed in few minutes. Regardless of considerable number of studies explored the kinds of microtasks, existing researches fall short when it comes to technical as well as non-technical tasks and the categorization of relevant microtasks. Thus, the aim of this research is to understand the context of microtasked related crowdsourcing and to explore the microtasks related to crowdsourced software development which exist in literature. Systematic literature review is conducted to identify the microtasking activities and expert review is conducted to validate the identified microtasking activities and their categories. The final publication sample to review the literature is composed of 42 research articles and the reviews of 4 experts are taken for validation. A total of 72 microtasking activities are found along with 11 categories. After validation applied, researchers came up with a list of 61 unique microtasking activities. This paper contributes to software industry by providing list of microtasks along with their categories which will be fruitful for researchers, microtasking platforms and their clients. It contributes to software industry by providing list of microtasks which will be fruitful for researchers and microtasking platforms. Microtasks, activities, crowdsourcing. INDEX TERMS

A Review of Trending Crowdsourcing Topics in Software Engineering Highlighting Mobile Crowdsourcing and AI Utilization

“…The paper researches and reviews all of the publications until 2020. Another review [7] provides a baseline understanding of microtasks and explores previous research within crowdsourcing while listing and verifying microtask activities and their categories, which could be helpful for researchers and platforms. For integrating agile development methodology with crowdsourcing, a literature review is carried out to specify challenges and summarize them into five categories [8].…”