A Systematic Literature Review on Task Recommendation Systems for Crowdsourced Software Engineering

TL;DR

This systematic review analyzes existing task recommendation systems in Crowdsourced Software Engineering, highlighting their data sources, methods, human factors, and identifying research gaps and future directions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive classification and analysis of CSE task recommendation systems, emphasizing human factors and proposing future research avenues.

Findings

Human factors significantly influence recommendation effectiveness.

Five popular task types are commonly recommended.

Key features and platforms used in recommendations are identified.

Abstract

Crowdsourced Software Engineering (CSE) offers outsourcing work to software practitioners by leveraging a global online workforce. However, these software practitioners struggle to identify suitable tasks due to the variety of options available. Hence, there have been a growing number of studies on introducing recommendation systems to recommend CSE tasks to software practitioners. The goal of this study is to analyze the existing CSE task recommendation systems, investigating their extracted data, recommendation methods, key advantages and limitations, recommended task types, the use of human factors in recommendations, popular platforms, and features used to make recommendations. This SLR was conducted according to the Kitchenham and Charters' guidelines. We used both manual and automatic search strategies without putting any time limitation for searching the relevant papers. We selected 65 primary studies for data extraction, analysis, and synthesis based on our predefined inclusion and exclusion criteria. From the results of the data analysis, we classified the extracted data into four categories based on the data extraction source, categorized the proposed recommendation systems to fit into a taxonomy, and identified the key advantages and limitations of these systems. Our results revealed that human factors play a major role in CSE task recommendation. Further, we identified five popular task types recommended, popular platforms, and their features used in task recommendation. We also provided recommendations for future research directions. This SLR provides insights into current trends, gaps, and future research directions in CSE task recommendation systems