The Verification Technique Of Complex Tasks' Functional Specification In Software Crowdsourcing

As a new software development model,software crowdsourcing eliminates the developer's demography and concentration limits of traditional software development.It adopts the method of group competition and lets the software project to be finished by many unknown workers online.Software crowdsourcing has the advantages of low cost,high efficiency,high quality and large degree of freedom,thus it has received increasing attention in recent years.And the domestic and foreign software crowdsourcing platforms have also got rapid development.Among the current software crowdsourcing platforms,one kind is to only support the small,quickly completed and tested tasks.The other one is to simply release the entire software system development as a single task.There is still no effective and general solution to the existing problems on the task decomposition and task description of software crowdsourcing,which has become a research hotspot and challenge in software crowdsourcing field.In this paper,we proposed and implemented a functional requirements specification framework for complex tasks in software crowdsourcing,and a verification method for the functional specification,as well as the mechanism for software crowdsourcing process management.Firstly,we presented a complex task description meta-model to support the task functional decomposition.The task's functional specification framework adopts formal language for the data abstraction declaration,the task's functional description and the invariant constraints definition.At the same time,it uses the graphical data flow to display the hierarchical relation of the task decomposition and the interaction relationship between subtasks.Then,we constructed a formal verification method based on the above functional specification framework.The method verifies the functional specification,ranging from the consistency of the abstract statement and the internal consistency of the task to the task satisfaction and the consistency of constraints.The verification method focuses on the verification of the correctness of the complex task's decomposition,including the functional consistency of the father and son tasks and the consistency of the interaction relationship between sub-tasks.Based on the verification of the complex task's functional specification and the verification method,we designed an acceptance test method for sub-tasks and a specification adjusting mechanism in the development process of crowdsourcing software projects,which offers the process management of the complex task in software crowdsourcing.Finally,we took an actual development task on a software crowdsourcing platform as a case study to perform the complete process: functional specification editing,the specification verification and the simulation of crowdsourcing process management.All of the process and result achieved the desire effect,which has verified feasibility and correctness of this solution.