Crowdsourcing for Software Development: Crowd Design

Literature about design suggests that a variety of alternatives leads to a higher quality final design. When software designers, either individually or together, are designing in front of the whiteboard, they rarely explore different solution alternatives. How can we help designers to explore more design alternatives for software problems? To achieve this, we are working on a process to facilitate designers to collaborate and produce high quality software designs while considering more solution alternatives. Additionally we are exploring how we can get crowd workers to design software using this process and leverage the wisdom of the crowd to explore even more solution alternatives.