Emergent Teams

The organization of software developers into teams is increasingly dynamic. Teams often form on an as-needed basis to solve particular problems. To help software developers collaborate within a dynamic team environment, we have introduced the Emergent Expertise Locator (EEL) tool. Based on how files have changed in the past and who has participated in these changes, EEL recommends members of an emergent team for a current problem of interest.

EEL has been built to work within the IBM Jazz client. EEL adds a context menu entry for a file accessed within the Jazz client that suggests relevant developers who may be able to provide expertise for that file.

We have validated EEL's recommendations against the source repositories for three existing projects: Eclipse, Bugzilla and Firefox. EEL is able to provide better recommendations for these systems than existing approaches based solely on the changes to a particular file.

Recent Publications

• Shawn Minto and Gail C. Murphy. Recommending emergent teams, MSR 2007. [PDF at IEEE Explore]

Funding

• This project is funded by IBM and NSERC.