The Concerns of a TopCoder Client

Hello class! The following is my response to the TopCoder case question two. I do not believe that the concerns I addressed are comprehensive of what an actual client would have, however, I believe that I have addressed some of the top core concerns that a client would have. I welcome any comments or questions that anyone may have about what I have said.
Source: TopCoder(A):Developing Software through Crowdsourcing

As a client of TopCoder, my main areas of concern are Quality, Intellectual Property, Security, and integration of the code. TopCoder does do a significant job of addressing these primary concerns. Contestants want to win; winning motivates them to deliver both high quality and bug-free code. It has also been seen that of the previous projects that TopCoder has completed, having developed the solution in house, their version would have had a significantly larger number of bugs. This is not to say that firms shouldn’t just go out and hire these members of the community to replace their current employees. Instead, TopCoder takes advantage of many teams of coders and rigorously evaluate contest submissions and developed an unbiased way of selecting contest winners.

TopCoder addresses other concerns such as Intellectual Property and Security in just as creative a fashion as the solutions that the community provides. TopCoder produced a white paper that served to detail the confidentiality policies and intellectual property assignment rules. Clients of TopCoder can have their companies name remain anonymous during the competition. To reduce the security risk, TopCoder helps their clients develop test data in order to minimize the risk of exposing sensitive information. Furthermore, if requested by the client, contestants can be required to sign a confidentiality agreement in order to be allowed entry into the contest.

As security is such a large concern, TopCoder took an even further step to ensure the safety of their clients systems. Clients can hold additional testing contests on the back-end to ensure the security and quality of the code. Moreover, TopCoder employees selected and vetted peer reviewers based on performance in prior competitions. By compartmentalizing the software development process, it becomes extremely more difficult for a single competitor to insert dangerous code into a program. This is so difficult because each contest only addresses a single small piece of the overall program. As each contest produces only a small piece of code as a portion of a larger program, integrating the code becomes much easier. Code fragments can be adjusted and fixed in order to fit into the puzzle and remain malleable to changes as the systems change over time.

Without its clients, TopCoder’s business model would not succeed. Therefore, it was increasingly important that they address their clients concerns. In this venture, TopCoder has succeeded. The anonymity of the company, confidentiality, and intellectual property arrangements made serve to protect the company. By no means does TopCoder replace the programming staff of a client. Instead, those employees are no longer the entire unit, but now act as the final layer of the project. It is those employees who evaluate the winning approaches and work to ensure that no security threats or bugs exist. Even though, from a pessimistic perspective, more can always be done, TopCoder does an incredible job to overcome the concerns of their clients.