SEL: Small: Crowdsourced Software Engineering using Gamification

软件工程在经济上变得越来越重要，几乎跨越了所有的行业和科学学科。事实上，它已经变得如此重要，以至于在软件设计、开发、测试、维护和分析中有比我们现有的软件工程劳动力所希望完成的更多的任务。已经提出了各种解决方案：例如，使程序员更有生产力，使程序员更不容易出错，更有效地培训程序员，从更年轻的年龄开始培训程序员，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为熟练专业人员的创新。提出了一种新的混合方法：工具帮助熟练的专业人员，同时培训新手成为熟练的专业人员。简而言之，建议构建使众包软件工程任务成为可能的接口。这样的接口可以帮助熟练的软件工程师减轻一些专业工作量；它还会通过付钱让不熟练的人变得更熟练地解决软件工程问题，从而帮助他们。在众包中提出的一个主要技术是游戏化。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他们天生的解决问题的能力；2)任务的自动预处理和后处理算法，如将问题分解成更小的部分，组合解决方案或帮助自动代码生成。

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.