Top Coder Case

TopCoder Inc.

Developing Software through Crowdsourcing

Group 4

Nikhil Goel Pradeep Khan Prasad Deshpande Rachit Jain Radhalaxmi R. Iyer

TopCoder Inc. - Inception

‡ Founded in 2001 by Jack Hughes ‡ Previously owned a traditional software firm ± Tallan ‡ Had been frustrated with the following business problems: ¾ Time-consuming and expensive process of talent recruitment ¾ Talent retention ± high turnover rate ¾ Development from scratch ± unable to reuse existing components

TopCoder Inc. ± company profile

‡ Runs by providing platform between two sides: ¾ First side ± clients. Interfaces with clients to understand their business needs and generate programming challenges based on it. ¾ Second side ± developers¶ community. Arrange contests for the community to create solutions to the challenges for money and skill ratings. Arranges two types of competition : ¾ Algorithmic competitions for generating solutions for generic difficult problems. ¾ Competitions for developing software solutions for specific client needs. Evaluate the solutions of the community through bug-testing and community peer-review Award money prize and skill ratings to the best solution provider. Identify reusable components from the software developed for the clients and store it in a catalog. Also acts as a source for providing best talents of their community to their clients.

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What¶s in it for the customer ?

How about getting it from a developer community?

Idea !!

Throw the challenge at them

Crowdsourcing, the new software development methodology

‡ Outsource a challenging software module/component to a large group of people - a community or a crowd. ‡ Generate interests by giving incentives like money, prizes, skill ratings etc. for the best performance. ‡ Access the quality of work through various standard procedures like bug tests, peer review etc. and generate scorecards. ‡ Use the best graded software module/component for integration with other...