Identifying Designers and their Design Knowledge

Abstract

This paper presents an approach to identify designers who participated in shaping the design of software systems. Designers are identified as well as their design knowledge. Identified designers are recommended to handle a high level change request. High level requests require changing the design of software systems. The identified design knowledge of designers is used to find the appropriate designer to handle a change request. Designers are developers who made design changes to the software. Identifying designers and their design knowledge is based on mining software repositories to extract design changes from commits. Developers who committed any design change are considered designers. Type and amount of committed design changes are used to identify the knowledge of designers. A tool has been developed to automatically recommend a set of designers to handle a high level change request. Recommended designers are ranked based on their knowledge that is identified from cumulative design activities for designers. The tool also extracts useful information and statistics about designers and their activities. A case study of two open source projects is presented to show the benefits of the proposed approach and tool. Results showed that most committers are not designers. It also shows that designers can be ranked based on their design knowledge.