Software Engineering Economics
Software Engineering Economics
Crowdsourcing and all-pay auctions
Proceedings of the 10th ACM conference on Electronic commerce
The relationship between search based software engineering and predictive modeling
Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Predictive Models in Software Engineering
Evaluating prediction systems in software project estimation
Information and Software Technology
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Many organisations have turned to crowdsource their software development projects. This raises important pricing questions, a problem that has not previously been addressed for the emerging crowdsourcing development paradigm. We address this problem by introducing 16 cost drivers for crowdsourced development activities and evaluate 12 predictive pricing models using 4 popular performance measures. We evaluate our predictive models on TopCoder, the largest current crowdsourcing platform for software development. We analyse all 5,910 software development tasks (for which partial data is available), using these to extract our proposed cost drivers. We evaluate our predictive models using the 490 completed projects (for which full details are available). Our results provide evidence to support our primary finding that useful prediction quality is achievable (Pred(30)0.8). We also show that simple actionable advice can be extracted from our models to assist the 430,000 developers who are members of the TopCoder software development market.