SCSMiner: Mining social coding sites for software developer recommendation with relevance propagation

With the advent of social coding sites, software development has entered a new era of collaborative work. Social coding sites (e.g., GitHub) can integrate social networking and distributed version control in a unified platform to facilitate collaborative developments over the world. One unique characteristic of such sites is that the past development experiences of developers provided on the sites convey the implicit metrics of developer’s programming capability and expertise, which can be applied in many areas, such as software developer recruitment for IT corporations. Motivated by this intuition, we aim to develop a framework to effectively locate the developers with right coding skills. To achieve this goal, we devise a generativ e probabilistic expert ranking model upon which a consistency among projects is incorporated as graph regularization to enhance the expert ranking and a perspective of relevance propagation illustration is introduced. For evaluation, StackOverflow is leveraged to complement the ground truth of expert. Finally, a prototype system, SCSMiner, which provides expert search service based on a real-world dataset crawled from GitHub is implemented and demonstrated. Copyright © 2018 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.