Expertise-Based Developer Assignment for Long-Term Software Components in Open-Source Projects
arXiv:2608.05919
Abstract
Open-source software development through GitHub has enabled countless software projects to be developed by developers from across the world. Assigning the right task to the right developer enables teams to work efficiently. Assigning a task which is not representative of a developer's expertise results in slower completion time and less maintainable code. Whilst much work has been done to automate this assignment for specific jobs, there is little work addressing the assignment of developers to expertise-specific long-term components of a new project. This paper produces a web application that models developers' expertise based on their previous Git commits and automatically assigns them to an optimal task within a new project. Testing showed that the system's speed varies depending on the back-end model used but server-side data caching improved worst-case speeds by a factor of 9.86. 72.4% of tasks had their target developer listed in the top 10, out of a possible 47.
Accepted at the Conference on Advanced Artificial Intelligence and Education (CAAIE 2026). 11 pages, 5 figures