Question

What evidence can you provide to illustrate why crowdsourcing is able to reduce system development costs? And What are some challenges with crowdsourcing.
Limit your response to 200 words.

Answer 1

In the modern world, crowdsourcing is essential in most organizations. It involves practices where the firm depends on the opinions of the crowd to solve problems. On the other hand, crowdsourcing is widely used in software development as it enables the business to reduce the cost incurred when creating software programs.

Crowdsourcing enhances cost reduction during software development. Software development incurs both major and minor costs depending on the program at hand. Significant prices include costs incurred when; purchasing hardware and software, cost of transportation, and recruitment of software engineers and training.

The minor cost is crucial too. Hence they include; office space maintenance for the software developers, prices for the support staff such as managers, security, accountants, cleaner, and technicians, and cost of network establishment in the communication sector. Also, without crowdsourcing, the organization is forced to establish a recreation sector such as libraries, life insurance dogmas, gyms, timely augmentations, among others.

However, the mentioned costs are only incurred when using traditional methods to develop, define, design, test, and implement software programs. Crowdsourcing eliminates all the expenses since most people work in the comfort of their homes hence interact through virtual communication platforms such as Skype. TopCoder is one of the organizations which have benefited from crowdsourcing

Every activity or initiatives in all firms have their challenges. Crowdsourcing is no exception. These challenges include the difficulty that organizations encounter when solving technical projects with the help of the crowd. First, it is a lack of confidentiality. Most of the people from the crown are anonymous; hence firms tend to hide crucial info from them to avoid leakage. Second, there is poor communication in crowdsourcing. It is challenging to communicate with people effectively since most of them come from all walks of the world; hence it is challenging to give directions to someone you don't even know