SEL: Small: Crowdsourced Software Engineering using Gamification

SEL：小型：使用游戏化的众包软件工程

• 批准号: 1423517
• 负责人: William Griswold
• 金额: $ 47.5万
• 依托单位: University of California-San Diego
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2014
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2014-09-01 至 2018-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1423517&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: SEL; Small; Crowdsourced; Software; Engineering

Software engineering becomes more economically crucial every day, cutting across virtually all industries and scientific disciplines. Indeed, it has become so crucial that there are more tasks in software design, development, testing, maintenance, and analysis than our existing software engineering workforce can hope to accomplish. Various solutions have been proposed: for example, making programmers more productive, making programmers less error prone, training programmers more effectively, training programmers from a younger age, and so on. All innovations in this space can be characterized as either tools that assist skilled professionals or innovations that help train novices to be skilled professionals.A novel hybrid approach is proposed: Tools that assist skilled professionals while simultaneously training novices to be skilled professionals. In short, it is proposed to build interfaces that make it possible to crowdsource software engineering tasks. Such interfaces would assist skilled software engineers by allowing them to discharge some of their professional workload; and it would assist the unskilled crowd by paying them to become more skillful at solving software engineering problems. A principle technique proposed in crowdsourcing is gamification. Crowdsourcing will consist of two mutually dependent parts: 1) a gaming interface that allows human beings to leverage their natural problem-solving abilities on the engineering task at hand, and 2) automated pre-processing and post-processing algorithms for tasks such as decomposing the problem into smaller pieces, combining solutions, or helping with automated code generation.

软件工程在经济上变得越来越重要，几乎涉及所有行业和科学学科。事实上，软件设计、开发、测试、维护和分析方面的任务已经变得如此重要，以至于超出了我们现有的软件工程人员能够完成的任务。 人们提出了各种解决方案：例如，提高程序员的生产力、使程序员不易出错、更有效地培训程序员、从小培养程序员等等。 该领域的所有创新都可以被描述为帮助熟练专业人员的工具或帮助将新手培训成为熟练专业人员的创新。提出了一种新颖的混合方法：在帮助熟练专业人员的同时将新手培训为熟练专业人员的工具。 简而言之，建议构建能够众包软件工程任务的接口。 这样的界面将帮助熟练的软件工程师减轻一些专业工作量；它将通过付费让不熟练的人群变得更熟练地解决软件工程问题来帮助他们。 众包中提出的一项主要技术是游戏化。 众包将由两个相互依赖的部分组成：1）游戏界面，允许人类在手头的工程任务中利用其自然的解决问题的能力；2）自动预处理和后处理算法，用于将问题分解为更小的部分、组合解决方案或帮助自动代码生成等任务。