@PHDTHESIS{ 2018:694537983,
 	title = {Empirical studies about collaboration in competitive software crowdsourcing},
 	year = {2018},
 	url = "http://tede2.pucrs.br/tede2/handle/tede/8256",
 	abstract = "Software Crowdsourcing (SW CS) is an emergent software development strategy where a large number of people have been engaged to contribute in several software activities. Such strategy (based on the crowd), has been used for companies who are seeking to increase the speed of their software development efforts. This strategy is usually structured around platforms that allow a requester submit a task to be performed and connect with the crowd that assigned and provide a solution for the task. These platforms usually explore a competitive approach: members of the crowd independently create a solution while compete against each other by monetary rewards for task completion. While competition usually reduces collaboration, some recent studies surprisingly indicate that there is collaboration in SW CS platforms. These studies have focused on two aspects. First, collaboration concerns between platform and requester in terms of crowd’s assignment to the challenges (task allocation and submission) and second, the impact of the collaboration among crowd members in the quality of the submitted solutions. Other aspects of the collaboration among crowd members have been largely unexplored. In this thesis, our goal is to identify collaboration’s characteristics and barriers faced by crowd members in competitive software crowdsourcing. To achieve this goal, we have conducted multiple studies, using mixed research methods divided in two phases: one exploratory and one evaluatory. For the exploratory phase, we used data collected from: (i) the three involved parties in SW CS projects (requester, crowd and platform) through semi structured interviews with practitioners and companies, (ii) studies selected via literature review; and (iii) an empirical study about how developer collaborated with each other in a SW CS competitive platform – TopCoder. The most frequent collaboration barrier was associated to lack of proper communication among the parties. Based on this barrier we decided, in the evaluatory phase, to conduct a (iv) qualitative analysis of the main communication channel used by the crowd: forums hosted on TopCoder platform and (v) a survey aimed at developers who had competed on TopCoder to assess the influence of collaboration in task performance. Our results from these evaluatory studies suggest that collaboration among crowd members is correlated with delivering winning solutions in SW CS challenges.",
 	publisher = {Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul},
 	scholl = {Programa de Pós-Graduação em Ciência da Computação},
 	note = {Escola Politécnica}
}