Trends on Crowdsourcing JavaScript Small Tasks

Crowdsourcing has become a popular alternative model for software development, aiming at assigning tasks to developers through an open call for participation. The major challenge when crowdsourcing software tasks, is to appropriately orient the tasks to ensure the participation of the community and increase the chances of getting a high-quality solution. Especially in constantly evolving development environments, such as JavaScript (JS) programming language and its applications, it is of high importance to be aware of the skills that can be acquired by the community, to successfully invest in crowdsourcing. In the current paper, we aim to explore trends when crowdsourcing small JS development tasks in an attempt to unveil a) the core technological skills that are more frequently required in the crowdsourced tasks, b) the functionalities that are more frequently crowdsourced, and c) the relationship between the technological skills and the functionalities crowdsourced. For this reason, we analysed 8-year contest data collected from Bountify crowdsourcing platform. The results showed that JS small task development does not focus on a single technology but on a series of technologies, frameworks and libraries that in most cases either overlap or complement each other.