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 3 elements: 1. online communities, providing the abundant low cost software developers with diverse technical capability and background; 2. crowdsourcing, providing incentive for developers’ participation and also motivating competition; and 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 (CBCD) model, as a new business model and a new method of organizing software development, was tested with real-life commercial software projects and proved to be effective.