Almost surreptitiously, crowdsourcing has entered software engineering practice. In-house development, contracting, and outsourcing still dominate, but many a software development project today uses crowdsourcing for a variety of purposes, whether it is to squash bugs, test their software, or gather alternative designs for a new user interface. While the overall impact has been mundane thus far, crowdsourcing has the potential to lead to fundamental and disruptive changes in how software will be developed in the future. This talk explores the models of crowdsourcing that have been applied to software development to date, outlines the exciting opportunities that exist, and articulates a series of challenges that must be overcome for crowdsourcing software development to truly reach its potential.

Thomas LaToza is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at George Mason University. He has degrees in psychology and computer science from the University of Illinois and a PhD in software engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. His research is in the area of human aspects of software development, encompassing empirical and design work on environments for programming, software design, and collaboration. He has been active in bringing human subjects studies to the investigation of software development activity and the evaluation of software development tools and has conducted over 20 studies with software developers, including observational studies, surveys, interviews, field deployments, and controlled experiments.