Design of a Question and Answer Approach to Crowd Debugging

Software debugging comprises most of the software maintenance time and is notorious for requiring high-level skills and application specific knowledge. Crowdsourcing software debugging could lower those barriers by having each programmer perform small, self-contained and parallelizable tasks, hence accommodating different levels of availability and expertise. Therefore, such new approach might enable society to tackle massive software development efforts, as for instance, setting a task force of hundreds of programmers to debug and adapt the existing software to be used in an emergency response to a natural catastrophe. This type of effort is unimaginable nowadays due to the high latency in mobilizing the right programmers and organizing their work. Crowdsourcing assists in overcoming these challenges due to the availability of a large base of contributors working towards a common goal. Debugging process is not a sequential task and this leads to the primary issue of dividing the debugging task into microtasks and asking the appropriate questions based on the microtasks for analysis of the software by the crowd. Our paper attempts to provide the solution of dividing the main task into several microtasks by leveraging the structure of the task followed by associating template questions with each of the microtasks. This can assist in reducing the overhead of the individual developer during the debugging process and make crowd debugging a reality