With the coming of the Internet era, great changes have taken place in the development models, runtime environments and providing styles of software. Being an open and collaborative working environment, Internet gives birth to mechanisms for successful crowd-based and collaborative creation, which have had profound impacts on development and application of software. How to combine these mechanisms with industrial approaches for trustworthy software production, and to improve the development efficiency and quality of software, are new challenging issues of software technologies in Internet era. This paper proposes a new approach for trustworthy software development based on the crowd wisdom, namely Crowd-based Method, which centers on crowd collaboration, resource sharing, runtime monitoring and trustworthiness analysis, to support the transformation from creative software works to mature software products, and supports the evolution of software. Firstly, an evidence-based concept model of trustworthy software is proposed, which classifies the data generated at the stages of software development, sharing and application as three kinds of trustworthiness evidence of software, and constructs a new process model for software evolution. Secondly, a service model for collaborative development and evolution of trustworthy software is proposed, which supports: (1) the socialized software development deeply combining the software creation and production; (2) the open and ranked trustworthy software resource sharing; and (3) the evaluation of software trustworthiness based on mass data analysis. Finally, with the background of the highly trustworthy software production tools and integrated environment (Trustie), this paper expounds the key technologies, development environments and application practices for the proposed Crowd-based Method.
