T-shaped grouping: Expert finding models to agile software teams retrieval

Abstract

Agile team formation is an important requirement of software companies. Since the members of an agile team should be generalizing specialists (i.e. T-shaped experts), we need members who are specialist in a specific topic and have general knowledge in other topics of the team. Selecting such members results in an ideal team which is flexible, high-performing and low-cost. In this paper, we define the problem of agile team formation in which given a set of required skills of an agile team, the ideal output is a set of low-cost candidates who can collectively cover the required skills while they can effectively communicate with each other. We propose two retrieval models to address this problem and then we introduce three evaluation measures for assessment. These measures are coverage, communication and optimality. Our experiments on two test collections extracted from StackOverflow demonstrate the efficiency of our proposed models in comparison with several strong baselines.