Recommending People in Developers' Collaboration Network

• Main Authors: SURIAN, Didi, LIU, Nian, LO, David, Tong, Hanghang, LIM, Ee Peng, Faloutsos, Christos
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2011
• Subjects: Developer Collaboration Network; Randow Walk with Restart; Recommendation Tool; DPP Graph; Software Engineering
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/1395; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/2394/viewcontent/wcre11_recommend.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Many software developments involve collaborations of developers across the globe. This is true for both open-source and closed-source development efforts. Developers collaborate on different projects of various types. As with any other teamwork endeavors, finding compatibility among members in a development team is helpful towards the realization of the team’s goal. Compatible members tend to share similar programming style and naming strategy, communicate well with one another, etc. However, finding the right person to work with is not an easy task. In this work, we extract information available from Sourceforge.Net, the largest database of open source software, and build developer collaboration network comprising of information on developers, projects, and project properties. Based on an input developer, we then recommend a list of top developers that are most compatible based on their programming language skills, past projects and project categories they have worked on before, via a random walk with restart procedure. Our quantitative and qualitative experiments show that we are able to recommend reasonable developer candidates from snapshots of Sourceforge.Net consisting of tens of thousands of developers and projects, and hundreds of project properties.