Title: Finding and identifying expert team members in open source environments

Authors: Hani Bani-Salameh; Muntaha Bnyan; Fatima Abu Hjeela

Addresses: Department of Software Engineering, The Hashemite University, Zarqa, Jordan ' Department of Software Engineering, The Hashemite University, Zarqa, Jordan ' Department of Software Engineering, Jordan University of Science and Technology, Irbid, Jordan

Abstract: Team members working in open-source development (OSD) environments, often are geographically distributed developing their software projects. For any software project to succeed, it is important to find the right experts who possess all the required skills and expertise. Searching for help and locating the right experts for each task are essential as well as extremely complicated tasks in OS environments. This article explores the problem of identifying experts in open-source environments. It focuses on mining developers' mailing lists to understand the developers' social structure and point out the experts involved in the development process. We identify the experts using the interaction factor (number of interactions), which means that the higher the number of interactions, the more active the team member. Results show that central members can be paramount experts in the network. Also, it shows that there are groups that can be defined by similarity based on members' connections. It concluded that the structure and location methods are very useful approaches in experts' prediction, and the proposed methodology can serve as an effective approach that OS project coordinators may use to identify experts.

Keywords: interactions; experts; teams; centrality; degree; betweenness; closeness; open-source; OS; environment; knowledge.

DOI: 10.1504/IJICT.2022.126420

International Journal of Information and Communication Technology, 2022 Vol.21 No.4, pp.350 - 368

Received: 22 Aug 2020
Accepted: 08 Dec 2020

Published online: 26 Oct 2022 *

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