Software Crowdsourcing Challenges in the Brazilian IT Industry
Leticia Machado
1
, Josiane Kroll
1
, Rafael Prikladnicki
1
, Cleidson R. B. de Souza
2
and Erran Carmel
3
1
Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS), Porto Alegre, Brazil
2
Department of Computing, (UFPA), Federal University of Pará, Belém, Brazil
3
School of Business, American University, Washington DC, U.S.A.
Keywords: Software Crowdsourcing, Software Dev
elopment, Software Engineering, Brazil, Challenges, IT Industry.
Abstract: Software crowdsourcing has been regarded as a new paradigm for the provision of crowd-labor in software
development tasks. Companies around the world adopt this paradigm to identify collective solutions to solve
problems, ways to accelerate time-to-market, increase the quality and reduce the software cost. Although
this paradigm is a trend in the software engineering area, several challenges are behind software
crowdsourcing. In this study, we explore how the software crowdsourcing has been developed in the
Brazilian IT industry. We have conducted 20 interviews with Brazilians practitioners in order to identify the
main challenges for software crowdsourcing in Brazil. Additionally, we identified and discussed enablers
and blockers’ factors, practice implications and directions for future research in the area. Our paper aims to
provide an overview of the software crowdsourcing in Brazil and motivation for researchers to better
understand challenges faced by the Brazilian IT industry.
1 INTRODUCTION
Crowdsourcing (CS) is defined as the act of an
organization to make its work available to an
undefined, potentially large networked of people – a
crowd - using an open call for participation (Howe,
2008). This concept has been adopted to disseminate
corporate tasks that were traditionally performed by
small groups of people.
CS has been adopted for several purposes such as
innovative design (Howe, 2008), information peer
production, knowledge and culture dissemination
data analysis (Brabham, 2008), and software
development (Lakhani et al., 2010; Wu et al., 2013).
CS in software development means to engage a
global pool of online workers that can be tapped on-
demand to provide software solutions or services
(Lakhani et al., 2010; Stol and Fitzgerald, 2014).
Many computational platforms were created to
handle the technical aspects of CS tasks, including
broadcasting of tasks, task assignment, and
submission and analysis of results (e.g. TopCoder,
Crowdtest and WeDoLogos).
In Brazil, software CS is in the early stages. We
have observed the lack of processes, models, and
practices to support the Brazilian community. This is
problematic because the adoption of CS in software
development activities can help to increase Brazilian
companies’ competitiveness in the global software
development market.
Our paper presents findings from a study
conducted in the Brazilian IT industry. This study
aimed to understand how software CS has been
adopted in the Brazilian IT industry and the main
challenges faced during its adoption. Additionally,
we identified and discussed enablers and blocking
factors for the software CS in Brazil, practice
implications and directions for future research in the
area.
Our study offers the following main
contributions:
A Set of Challenges Concerning the
Adoption of Software CS by the Brazilian IT
Industry: since Brazil is in the early stages of
adoption of software CS, we explore the particular
challenges associated with it practice in Brazil.
The Theoretical Foundation for Further
Research in the Area and Developing of Solutions
for the Brazilian Community: to identify and
understand which aspects are related to the adoption,
or not, of software CS in the Brazilian IT industry is
the first step towards integrating and facilitating the
CS model in other organizations.
482
Machado, L., Kroll, J., Prikladnicki, R., Souza, C. and Carmel, E.
Software Crowdsourcing Challenges in the Brazilian IT Industry.
In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2016) - Volume 1, pages 482-489
ISBN: 978-989-758-187-8
Copyright
c
2016 by SCITEPRESS Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved
2 SOFTWARE
CROWDSOURCING
CS is a hybrid model regarding to intrinsic and
extrinsic motivation (Mao et al., 2013). Motivation
can be driven by financial rewards, which are
extrinsic factors. On the other hand, crowd
participants are also interested in reputation that can
be earned through knowledge is shared – intrinsic
intentions (Olson and Rosacker, 2013).
Despite this outward similarity, characteristics of
service providers and suppliers are different in the
two models. While with traditional outsourcing an
entity subcontracts a handful of professional third-
party companies, CS model turns to scale via an
undefined, open, and heterogeneous online “crowd”
to source in these needs (Saxton et al., 2013).
A significant distinction between software
development strategies is the duplication of work. In
CS, activities are performed in parallel, distributed
in many chunks instead of single projects. The main
differences among Innersourcing, Outsourcing,
software CS, and Open Source Software (OSS) are
presented in Table 1. The payment characteristics of
software development strategies also are different. In
software CS payments are based on reward per tasks
(Âgerfalk et al., 2015). In OSS, knowledge is for
sharing, with the focus on the development of better
software and little if any attention given to
profitability. Software CS is an application of the
OSS principles to other industries. However, it
receives an open and unidentified group that
competes to solve a problem (Olson and Rosacker,
2013).
For each CS area three main elements are
adopted as shown in Figure 1. The first component
is the CS platform, which acts as the intermediates
between the two other components and consolidates
the tasks outcomes. The second component is the
Crowd, which is globally dispersed. The third
component is the Requesters. They are the
companies or the individuals whom demands the
work (tasks) (Prikladnicki et al., 2014).
Figure 1: Basic crowdsourcing model.
Many authors argue that CS promotes creativity
and problem solving (Kittur et al., 2013). However,
software CS has many issues and unique features.
Some of them still need for support (Wu et al, 2013):
complex and heterogeneous tasks, interdependent
tasks, several types of expertise, and activities of
collective control.
These issues in software CS include quality, cost,
diversity of solutions, delivery speed and,
competitive scenarios. Furthermore, studies discuss
many challenges and opportunities for better
understand, evaluate and support the CS influence
the software industry (Huhns et al., 2013).
2.1 The Brazilian IT Industry
Brazil is one of the largest economies in the world.
Brazil has unique characteristics. Population of 200
million people; large and expanding domestic
market; single language; sophisticated financial
market; industry and business knowledge; qualified
human resources; infrastructure; governmental
support; favorable economic, political, and legal
environment (Prikladnicki and Carmel, 2014). Thus,
Brazil plays an important role in the global
economy.
We decide to investigate software CS in the
Brazilian IT industry because Brazil has the biggest
and most diversified science, technology and
innovation system of Latin America. According to
Forbes magazine (2014), Brazil’s economy
outweighs that of all other South American
countries, and Brazil is expanding its presence in
world markets. We expect having emerging and
large economies like Brazil taking place in the
software CS market with more platforms, requesters
Table 1: Software Development Strategies.
Innersourcing Outsourcing CS OSS
Concept
Traditional business
model
Traditional global
business model
Web business model Online Community
Nature of workforce
Specific group Specific group
Open and undefined
group
Open group
Incentives
Extrinsic Extrinsic Extrinsic/Intrinsic Intrinsic
Intellectual Propriety
Enterprise Enterprise
Winning solutions CS
enterprise
Members’ license
Payment
On payroll Contract Pay per tasks Often unpaid
Software Crowdsourcing Challenges in the Brazilian IT Industry
483
and large crowds.
The Brazilian IT industry does not take a risk
before something (technology, model or process) is
been widely known in other international markets.
The Brazilian market has a more pre-cultural attitude
in order to preserve conditions, principles, and
existing processes. This market keeps a traditional
way to carry out business. Few companies engage in
innovative projects and pilot projects with a degree
of uncertainty (Prikladnicki et al., 2014).
3 RELATED WORK
Whereas CS has been discussed in a wide variable
domain, still have a small number of studies
discussing software CS initiatives in different
countries.
The adoption of CS platforms in South Africa is
discussed by Chuene and Mtsweni (2015). This
study was performed in order to understand how it is
used and by whom. The authors report the
embracing of CS initiatives has been slow,
especially amongst public organizations, due to
various reasons, such as lack of awareness. Some
local CS platforms such as “Txteagle” launched in
Kenya and Rwanda enables citizens to earn few
dollars by completing micro-tasks on their mobile
phones. A South African platform presented is
focused on crowd-funding, social, and government
crowdsourcing aspects. This study reveals a lack of
information pertaining to the status and number of
users benefiting from the adopted and/or deployed
platforms.
In a recent study performed by To and Lai
(2015), the authors discuss the latest developments
in crowdsourcing in China. They describe CS
scenarios in terms of concerns and opportunities.
China offers CS advantages, it because includes the
online population’s size people’s and their
willingness to participate of the CS activities. Other
opportunity was the Zhubajie’s CS Chinese
platform, where it services aren’t closed off to
English speakers. Chinese freelancers also
participate in other markets. CS barriers reported in
this study are the language between client and CS
partners. Another concern was the censorship and
government control, and intellectual property rights.
China and India are successful in attracting
global outsourcing industry (Perera and Perera,
2014). China has a large educated workforce, high
quality infrastructure, government keenness, etc.
While India has lower labor cost, familiarity with
western business practices, positive time zone
difference, Indian owned global delivery centers and
strong private-public partnership. In China,
crowdsourcing platforms such as Zhubajie
(zhubajie.com), TaskCN (taskcn.com) and K68
(k68.com) have attracted a lot of innovative talent
and solution seekers, which greatly enhance business
operations (Shao et al., 2012).
4 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
An initial ad hoc literature review was carried out
with the purpose of sharing the basic CS concepts
with the research team and identifying the
challenges to be addressed. Semi-structured
interviews were conducted iteratively with
Brazilians practitioners from different Brazilian
companies. Our goal here is better understand how
the software crowdsourcing has been adopted in the
Brazilian IT industry. The interviews focused on
both industry and academic perspective. Each
interview lasted between 30 and 60 minutes.
We created an interview protocol with open-
ended questions focusing on the discussions of both
perspectives: industry - organizational motivations
for leveraging the crowd, specific tasks to be
completed and perceived impacts on the
organization; and academic – sharing characteristics
with related research areas like software testing,
collaborative software engineering, distributed
software development and distributed collaborative
programming.
4.1 Participants
We conducted a total of 20 interviews, in which the
majority of interviewees were males (18) and the
others females (2). Thirteen participants were from
the first group (industry) and 7 participants were
from the second group (academic). These
participants are mainly from the south of Brazil.
Participants have 3 years of working experience in
average.
The industry participants are classified under
three different CS perspectives: buyer, platform, and
crowd. We interviewed participants from two
pioneer Brazilian CS platforms – Crowdtest and
WeDoLogos. These companies are the two largest
crowd testers and crowd designers in Latin America.
We interviewed academic participants during
The Brazilian Conference on Software: Theory and
Practice (CBSoft 2014). The CBSoft is one of the
largest events held by the Brazilian Computer
Society, with the goal of promoting and encouraging
ICEIS 2016 - 18th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems
484
Table 2: Participants’ information.
Participant # Job Title
Type of experience
(Academic or Industry or Both)
Element
P1..P6 Tester Industry and Academic Crowd
P7, P8 Developer Industry and Both Crowd
P9..P11 Assistant Professor (System analyst) Academic Crowd
P12 Developer Both Requester
P13 Manager (IT Consultant) Industry Requester
P14 IT Manager (Host Service Company) Industry Requester
P15 IT Manager (E-Commerce Company) Industry Requester
P16 Manager (IT Company) Industry Requester
P17 Manager (Media Company) Industry Requester
P18 CEO (Innovation Consultant) Industry Requester
P19 CEO (WeDoLogos) Industry Platform
P20 CEO (Crowdtest.me) Industry Platform
the exchange of experiences between the scientific,
academic and professional communities in Software
Engineering (SE). The participants’ details are
presented in Table 2. The last column called Element
presents the three basic elements of the CS model, in
which each participant was classified (see Figure 1).
4.2 Procedure
We conducted the interviews face-to-face, by voice
or video conference call, and by email. Some
conversations were not audio recorded because of
companies’ confidentiality issues. The interviewees
were asked to report their experiences in software
CS under six aspects: (1) CS initiative, (2) CS
platforms, (3) CS tasks and projects, (4) CS
payment, (5) business impact, and (6) the future. We
present the interview questionnaire in Table 3.
Table 3: Interview Questionnaire.
Aspects Questions
CS
Initiatives
Do you know CS?
Tell us about your CS experience?
Are you doing micro-tasking specifically?
Or are you doing macro task projects?
CS
Platforms
Which Platforms (middlemen) have been
used?
What is the number of workers in the
crowd?
CS Tasks
and
Projects
What have you done to achieve and inspect
for quality? What has worked best?
How do you manage day-to-day tasks?
CS
Payment
Is the enterprise encouraging / discouraging
the use of paid CS?
Business
impact
By what measure was it successful? What
has made this challenge a success?
How did you measure success?
Future
What are your plans for CS?
What is the Brazilian CS scenario for the
next three years?
4.3 Data Analysis
Our data analysis was guided by techniques
associated with less procedural versions of the
grounded theory (GT). Specifically, we applied the
techniques of coding and constant comparison as
recommended by Corbin and Strauss (2008). These
techniques helped us to elicit emergent themes in the
Brazilian IT industry, to identify concepts in the
collected data and to link these concepts to higher-
level categories.
5 FINDINGS
Our findings show that both academic and industry
participants have different experiences using CS for
micro and complex tasks. They have adopted CS for
software and other domains. They have performed
tasks such as, testing service and image recognition.
We also identified collaborative tools adopted by
Brazilians to improve software development. These
tools are based on crowd knowledge such as GitHub
and Stackoverflow.
Table 4: CS research in Brazil.
Research Area Crowdsourcing Topics
Experimental SE
Software Engineering
Barriers to contribute to the
open sourcing process
Software testing
Crowd testing model of the
enterprise
Collaborative Software
Engineering
Collaborative tools – CS
Platform
Crowd knowledge
Software Ecosystems
Platform
Distributed software
development and open
participation (crowd)
Distributed collaborative
programming
Motivation, coordination
and sharing knowledge
Software Crowdsourcing Challenges in the Brazilian IT Industry
485
Researchers are investigating Crowd testing in
two contexts – distributed and traditional testing
software. We observed from these findings research
opportunities in other software ecosystems that share
the same characteristics with other research areas.
Table 4 presents the research areas and topics in
software CS.
5.1 CS Elements Perspective
Our findings show that Brazil has a few CS buyer’s
initiatives and platforms. On the other hand,
Brazilian active members’ are emerging both on
national and international CS platforms.
We describe our findings based on three
perspectives: Crowd, Requesters, and Platform.
These results can be categorized in enablers and
blockers’ factors. Table 5 shows these factors.
Table 5: Enablers and Blockers’ factors in Software CS.
Elements Enablers Blockers
Crowd
Extra money Poor feedback
Shared
knowledge
Few collaboration
Curiosity
Scarce context
project information
Free time
Unavailability of
documentation
Requesters
Scalability
Specific business
knowledge
Save money and
time
Low quality of
services
Creativity
Maturity of
suppliers (crowd)
New ways to do
the same
Identifying a
specific process
Platform
Fast delivery Data confidentiality
Reduced cost
Very specific
business rules
Diverse types of
testing
Laws and taxes
involved
An enabler factor means a characteristic that
promotes or motivates the CS practice. On the other
hand, a blocker factor means a characteristic that
inhibits or limits the CS practice.
As enablers, there is the collective intelligence of
the software engineering industry with more
diversity, creativity and knowledge sharing.
Scalability, cost reduction and time-to-market are
also important enablers for platforms and requesters.
As blockers, the requesters pointed out the low
quality of services, the difficulty in identifying a
specific process to distribute tasks to the crowd and
the maturity and adoption of CS in Brazil.
5.2 Challenges
We identified challenges related to three areas:
Tasks, Processes and People. Each area can describe
one or more challenges.
Tasks – Lack of Quality
Challenges related to tasks area includes the lack the
quality of platforms and micro-tasks. The platform
should provide clear information and support
documentation to the crowd, appropriate structure
for the submission of solutions, and feedback to
submitted tasks.
Micro-tasks refer to the personal demand created
by requesters. The configuration of the micro-task
request is performed through CS parameters such as
specific subject, constraints, quality issues, monetary
reward, and target worker. Participants reported the
unavailability of documentation on tasks
requirements, specific business rules and scarce
context about the tasks. In some projects,
participants report the need for more information to
complete and deliver distributed tasks. They also
need to achieve the requesters’ expectations. Stol
and Fitzgerald (2014) also describe the task quality
assurance challenge under the requester perspective.
Testers describe the lack of information on
reported bugs. A tester participant, who has worked
on the Crowdtest Brazilian platform, describes how
errors are reported.
“Everyone reports errors in the same place and
the tool does not return with the reason why the
reported error was not considered as an error to the
platform (client), and we were no guarantee"
(Participant 5).
On the other hand, the requester describes the
quality of crowd deliveries. In his opinion, the lack
of qualified works is the main problem.
"Sometimes there is a lack of professionalism in
this environment. Most of the time filters are not
performed by the platforms to allocate the profile of
qualified members” (Participant 14).
A buyer, who has bought services on
WeDoLogos platform since 2010, says that in this
field there are few professionals with specific skills.
For him, the majority of workers are not skilled.
Although the quality of the service is considered
good for him, he receives few proposals to perform
the work (approximately 10 proposals per project).
On the other hand, another participant describe a
project in which he received more than 200
proposals. However, the quality of the delivery by
the crowd was very low. Only 10% of solutions
received from the crowd could be take. For some
projects, he has considered to return to the
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486
traditional model of hiring service to meet his needs.
"I believe that for small businesses the
crowdsourcing model can work. The quality of
service is low and any delivery is part of the crowd"
(Participant 12).
Processes – Lack of CS Processes
Since the crowd and requesters from Brazil have
little experience in software CS, we observed
challenges related to the immature adoption of CS
processes. Users are not familiar themselves with the
CS processes.
Participants from the buyer’s group report the
importance of having a process to support the
adoption of CS initiatives. Participants emphasize
limitations to adopt CS models in business. These
limitations are related to CS management processes
in terms of collectively coordination,
communication and collaboration.
“Brazil is a very conservative country and it
needs to prepare people to work with
crowdsourcing. It is necessary to have a strong
process behind the platform and people to support
business” (Participant 13).
“Crowdsourcing is difficult in our company
because it is necessary to have a visibility of tasks
(progress activities, for instance “to do”, “doing”
and “done”). We have a strong work process
orientated on quality and productivity.
Crowdsourcing could be a new direction to the
future but it requires a maturity level and another
mindset” (Participant 16).
A participant reports the use of CS model for
open innovation domain in Brazil. This project
started in 2006. Recently, this project has a
partnership with a CS innovation platform called
Innocentive. The requester describes how the CS
processes work in this project.
“I believe in the crowdsourcing model for my
business and my clients. The process created by
them has been used with good results for the clients.
The success in crowdsourcing projects depends on
some factors, such as number of projects,
participant engagement, ideas proposed by
participants, deployment of solutions, number of
participants, and concept of phases to
crowdsourcing projects (dependent on the
complexity and investment by client)” (Participant
18).
The participant also describes tools to support
the process. These tools are only adopted as an
interface between customers and network (crowd).
For him. It is more important to focus on how the
project design is planned and executed by the
workers.
People – Cultural Barriers
Brazil has particular laws and legislation. The
country is very concern on labor law and
bureaucratic issues.
Brazil is a conservative country in terms of
distributed software development. Usually, Brazil
receives a lot of outsourcing demands but it is not
used to outsource. The most of the time, Brazil is
much more a supplier than a consumer.
The country is a special case in terms of software
development. Brazilians companies and labor
participate in global CS marketplaces, but it also
“plays in their own sandbox”. It may happen
because of language issues. Portuguese is the official
language in Brazil and the majority of the population
do not speaks another language.
Another fact is that Brazilians prefer to have a
permanent job besides to be to have freelancer job.
In addition, participants report do not trust in having
a virtual contract of work. They are very
conservative people.
One of our findings shows a contradiction
between the collaborative culture of Brazil and the
competitive environment in the economy. Brazil still
trying to introduce a new model of work.
“Companies control logic and create an
antagonism in relation to digital networks.
Companies have difficulty in changing their business
to work in a complex world. Companies want the
control of their idea” (Participant 8).
Brazilians companies do not understand the
distributed workforce within a collaborative system.
They have concerns about intellectual property and
business rules. According to the participant 18, CS is
much more talked about than consumed in Brazil.
6 DISCUSSION
CS is an emerging topic in software industry. It
provides a new approach for companies involve their
workers with innovation activities. However, despite
the positive effects, many challenges are identified
for CS practice. The Brazilian IT industry has
specific challenges that make this country different
from others.
We found that the main challenges faced by
Brazilians practitioners are concentrate in three areas
Tasks, Processes, and People. We also found eleven
enablers and blockers factors for the CS practice in
Brazil.
Tasks are difficult to manage in CS
environments. Requesters expect to receive a task
with certain level of quality. However, in some cases
Software Crowdsourcing Challenges in the Brazilian IT Industry
487
the delivery do not attend the expectations of the
requester. According to (Li et al., 2013), one of the
most problems in CS is quality control to ensure the
quality of results. The factors of quality for CS tasks
are the number of participants, tasks assignment to
workers according to their individual expertise, and
the reward amount. The inappropriate worker-task
matching may harm the quality of the software
deliverables (Mao et al., 2015).
On the other hand, workers report the lack of
information that can result in a task delivered with
low quality. When workers understand what
information is need for the task specification, it will
be possible to provide solutions to problems that
meet customers’ needs. However, to Wu et al.
(2013) the vendor selection has a direct correlation
with the quality of an outcome. Workers are
attracted by an open call format rather than being
selected. It encourage the non-skilled workers to
participate. The list of countries with higher level of
active members shows Brazil on 14º ranking
position between 50 countries. Country rankings are
based on an aggregation of the TopCoder members
within a particular country that have competed
within the last 180 days
(https://community.topcoder.com/).
The lack of processes definition is another
challenge faced by the Brazilian IT industry. To take
advantage the power of software CS, it is important
to define the proprieties, elements, responsibilities
and interaction flows of software CS as a new
software development process (Kittur et al., 2013).
While other countries like United States adopt and
invest in crowdsourced development processes,
Brazil adopts a timid posture regards to it. Brazil has
only two CS platforms to support software activities.
We believe that online markets for software CS
tasks such as software project development
activities, still have not received attention from
companies and workers. Currently, Brazilian
platforms do not meet the requesters’ expectations.
According to our findings, Brazilian platforms
support only few types of activities.
Portuguese is the official language in Brazil.
English is the global language of business. The
majority of Brazilians speak only Portuguese. Thus,
the Brazilian community face difficulties to use
international CS platforms due to the language.
The intellectual propriety in software CS is a
world polemic question. In Brazil, this question is
amplified because the Brazilian laws and legislation
have characteristics of trade protectionism.
In literature, few authors explore region-specific
practices in CS software project. Europe and United
States are well populated with CS participants, but
that still does not say much about potential
differences in acceptance of CS across the globe.
In our study, some cultural aspects in CS are
presented. Brazilians are highly creative in their own
way, but the country is still underdeveloped in terms
of software CS. Cross-cultural differences in the
adoption of CS and open approaches to business are
still under-explored.
CS is a business concept that focus on the use of
intelligence, collectivity and volunteer knowledge to
solve problems, improve or develop new products,
technologies and services (Brabham, 2008).
Nevertheless, CS still not clearly understood by
many companies that can take advantage of this
concept. Brazilians are highly creative in their own
way, but the country is still underdeveloped in terms
of software CS. Cross-cultural differences in the
adoption of CS and open approaches to business are
still under-explored.
Under the Brazilian perspective, there are many
issues regards to CS elements’ (requester, platform
and crowd). To Carmel and Eisenberg (2006),
Brazilian national software builds pride inside the
Brazilian software community to develop software
under conditions of hardship. For these authors,
Brazilian software companies do not believe in its
capacity to create and offer job for other workers
and other markets.
Every country is unique and has its own specific
challenges when it comes to change the way of
work, like implementing software CS. This study
gives a starting point on region-specific practices in
crowdsourced software development.
6.1 Limitations of this Study
We are aware of the limitations of this study, since
our study does not seek to establish any causal
relationships, we do not discuss threats to internal
validity.
The qualitative analysis of the interviews was
performed by the authors together, which limited the
effects of possible researcher bias in the analysis.
We also adopted grounded theory to analyze
collected data using descriptive statistics and
techniques (Corbin and Strauss, 2008).
We interviewed Brazilians practitioners with
different experience levels. The imbalance
experience could have influenced positively or
negatively in our findings. Unfortunately, the
identified findings are not exhaustive. They only
represent those that have been experienced and
observed by our participants. We have carefully
ICEIS 2016 - 18th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems
488
selected the participants in this study.
7 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE
WORK
In this study, we investigate how the software CS has
been developed in the Brazilian IT industry. We
found that Brazil is very conservative and moderate in
terms of adoption of software CS in IT scenario.
Brazil has a few requesters’ demand, both in national
and international CS platforms. Also, we found few
CS platforms to support the Brazilian market.
Although Brazil is an important software market
and one of the most important emerging economies,
we are not surprised with our findings. Brazil has a
weak participation in software CS initiatives.
Our results show that the main challenges in
software CS in Brazil are related to Tasks,
Processes, and People. We believe that for the
software CS to work effectively, it is important to
better understand the issues related to the three CS
elements (Crowd, Requesters, Platform). Given this
perspective, the research we present here is of value
to both to academic and industrial communities. We
also believe that these findings are particularly
important from the Brazilian perspective; however,
they also help add to the body of evidence in the
field of software engineering.
In spite of the challenges, we believe that CS will
get new labor markets in future. Markets that are
disrupted, like the Brazilian software market, shall
see changes in the types of tasks that are currently
being performed. Also, software development
though CS may it will help to alleviate the Brazilian
cultural limitations mentioned in this study.
More empirical research is needed on how to
develop software CS in Brazil. We plan to follow
our case organizations to see how they minimize the
identified challenges, collecting more detailed data
about their software practices, as well as by
additional interviews.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work is partially funded by CNPq (312127/2015-4).
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