From Open Source to Commercial Software Development - the Community Based Software Development Model
Start Date
12-17-2013
Description
The successful practice of OSS leads to the intuition that integrating online software engineering community into the value chain of software company may be a solution to access qualified workforce and to reduce product cost. The emerging practice of crowdsourcing offers a potential solution for this attempt. Adopting an action research approach, the researchers collaborated with a software company in China and developed a crowdsourcing based software community development model, which consists of three elements: 1. online communities, providing abundant low cost software developers with diverse technical backgrounds; 2. crowdsourcing, providing incentive for developers’ participation and motivating competition; 3. process management and quality control mechanism, borrowed from in-house software development practice, guaranteeing the product quality and fulfillment of project schedule. This crowdsourcing based community development model, as a new business model and a new method of organizing software development, was tested with real-life projects and proved to be effective.
Recommended Citation
Yan, Jie and Wang, Xinqiao, "From Open Source to Commercial Software Development - the Community Based Software Development Model" (2013). ICIS 2013 Proceedings. 3.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2013/proceedings/EngagedScholarship/3
From Open Source to Commercial Software Development - the Community Based Software Development Model
The successful practice of OSS leads to the intuition that integrating online software engineering community into the value chain of software company may be a solution to access qualified workforce and to reduce product cost. The emerging practice of crowdsourcing offers a potential solution for this attempt. Adopting an action research approach, the researchers collaborated with a software company in China and developed a crowdsourcing based software community development model, which consists of three elements: 1. online communities, providing abundant low cost software developers with diverse technical backgrounds; 2. crowdsourcing, providing incentive for developers’ participation and motivating competition; 3. process management and quality control mechanism, borrowed from in-house software development practice, guaranteeing the product quality and fulfillment of project schedule. This crowdsourcing based community development model, as a new business model and a new method of organizing software development, was tested with real-life projects and proved to be effective.