SEL: Small: Crowdsourced Software Engineering using Gamification

软件工程在经济上的重要性与日俱增，几乎贯穿了所有行业和科学学科。事实上，它已经变得如此关键，以至于在软件设计、开发、测试、维护和分析方面的任务比我们现有的软件工程人员希望完成的任务更多。已经提出了各种解决方案：例如，提高程序员的生产力，减少程序员容易出错的可能性，更有效地培训程序员，从小培训程序员，等等。这一领域的所有创新都可以被描述为要么是帮助熟练专业人员的工具，要么是帮助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：帮助熟练专业人员的工具，同时将新手培训为熟练专业人员。简而言之，建议构建能够将软件工程任务众包的接口。这样的接口将通过允许熟练的软件工程师履行他们的一些专业工作来帮助他们；它将通过支付他们在解决软件工程问题方面变得更熟练来帮助非熟练的人群。众包中提出的一种主要技术是游戏化。众包将由两个相互依赖的部分组成：1)游戏界面，允许人类利用他们在手头的工程任务中自然解决问题的能力，以及2)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的自动前处理和后处理算法。

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.