Expertise Browser: a quantitative approach to identifying expertise

Abstract

Finding relevant expertise is a critical need in collaborative software engineering, particularly in geographically distributed developments. We introduce a tool, called Expertise Browser (ExB), that uses data from change management systems to locate people with desired expertise. It uses a quantification of experience, and presents evidence to validate this quantification as a measure of expertise. The tool enables developers, for example, to easily distinguish someone who has worked only briefly in a particular area of the code from someone who has more extensive experience, and to locate people with broad expertise throughout large parts of the product, such as modules or even subsystems. In addition, it allows a user to discover expertise profiles for individuals or organizations. Data from a deployment of the tool in a large software development organization shows that newer, remote sites tend to use the tool for expertise location more frequently. Larger, more established sites used the tool to find expertise profiles for people or organizations. We conclude by describing extensions that provide continuous awareness of ongoing work and an interactive, quantitative resume/spl acute/.