An approach to recommend a ranked list of developers to assist in performing software changes given a textual change request is presented. The approach employs a two-fold strategy. First, a technique based on information retrieval is put at work to locate the relevant units of source code, e.g., files, classes, and methods, to a given change request. These units of source code are then fed to a technique that recommends developers based on their source code change expertise, experience, and contributions, as derived from the analysis of the previous commits. The commits are obtained from a software system’s version control repositories (e.g., Subversion). The approach is demonstrated on a bug report from KOffice, an open source application suite.
Huzefa H. Kagdi, Denys Poshyvanyk