DevRec: A Developer Recommendation System for Open Source Repositories

The crowds’ active contribution is one of the key factors for the continuous growth and final success of open source software. With the massive amounts of competitions, how to find and attract the right developers to engage in is quite a crucial yet challenging problem for open source projects. Most of the current works mainly focus on recommending experts to specific fine-grained software engineering tasks and the candidates are often confined to the internal developers of the project. In this paper, we propose a recommendation system DevRec which combines users’ activities in both social coding and questioning and answering (Q&A) communities to recommend developer candidates to open source projects from all over the community. The experiment results show that DevRec is good at solving cold start problem, and performs well at recommending proper developers for open source projects.