Optimized Assignment of Developers for Fixing Bugs

Decisions on “Who should fix this bug” have substantial impact on the duration of the process and its results. Expertise and related productivity level of developers might vary up to one order of magnitude. This is even more the case if we acknowledge that fixing a bug typically requires expertise in a number of components. In this paper, optimized strategies for the assignment of the “right” developers for doing the “right” task are studied and the results are compared to manual (called ad hoc) assignment. The quality of assignment is measured by the match between requested (from bugs) and available (from developers) competence profile. Different variants of Greedy search with varying parameter of look-ahead time are studied. The quality of the results has been evaluated for nine milestones of the open source Eclipse JDT project. The optimized strategies with largest look ahead time are demonstrated to be substantially better than the ad hoc solutions in terms of the quality of the assignment and the number of bugs which can be fixed within the given time interval.