Software Crowdsourcing (SW CS) allows a requester to increase the speed of its software development efforts by submitting a task to be performed by the crowd. SW CS is usually structured around software platforms, which are used by crowd members to identify a task suited for them, gather information about this task, and finally, submit a solution for it. In competitive software crowdsourcing, members of the crowd independently create solutions while competing against each other by monetary rewards for task completion. While competition usually reduces collaboration, in this paper, we investigated how crowd members create a collaborative behavior during programming challenges using online forums to help each other, share useful information, and discuss important documents and artifacts. We also investigated different collaborative behaviours by crowd members and and how this collaboration is associated with crowd members' improved outcome in the challenges. These results are based on analysis of the online forums from Topcoder, one of the largest competitive SW CS platforms

Crowdsourcing divides a task into small pieces that are carried out by the crowd. In Software Engineering, crowdsourcing divides the software development tasks of to be carried out online by the crow and is simply called Software Crowdsourcing (SW CS). Most SW CS platforms support this emerging software development strategy and operate within a framework of competition among the crowd. Competitive SW CS platforms intentionally minimize communication and collaboration among the parties involved (customer, platform, and crowd) while they compete in the software development tasks. The goal of this paper is to investigate platform moderators in SW CS challenges. Platform moderators are individuals who work for the SW CS platforms to mediate customer and crowd. A qualitative analysis of the content of the communication forums hosted on the TopCoder platform was performed to analyze the messages exchanged by the platform moderators and the crowd. Our empirical results indicate that co-pilots enforce and, at the same time, extend the limitations of the documentation associated with the tasks to support crowd members, provide technical help to crowd members during the competitions, and engage the crowd in the challenges. Co-pilots are organized, work diligently, worrying about being fair, and, at the same time, seeking to find a balance between autonomy and dependency on the customer. We conclude by providing insights to improve the design of software crowdsourcing platforms.

Software Crowdsourcing (SW CS) is an emerging area in Software Engineering (SE). It has a dynamic nature in which problems are opened up to crowds of people through an open call to solve problems with the incentive of prizes for the best solutions. Although SW CS has been increasingly adopted in the software industry, many open issues are still to be elucidated. For instance, collaboration aspects are one of those issues. They impact communication and coordination practices. This study aims to identify barriers to collaboration in SW CS and communication practices that might help overcome these barriers. We identified the barriers and practices from a qualitative data analysis study considering an available literature review report. Our study contributes to the SE area by providing insights for researchers, tool designers, and managers that might help them to better understand collaboration issues and proposed solutions to solve them.

Web Usage Mining (WUM) focus on the interaction behavior between Web users and requested Web pages in order to identify navigation patterns. This work describes a case study aimed at investigating the potential of WUM as a framework for supporting the validation of learning site designs. The goal was to model the domain in terms of a WUM application, and to explore abstractions and types of patterns that can help site usage evaluation.