Online Formation of Large Tree-Structured Team

Software projects are often divided into different components and groups of individuals are assigned to various parts of the project. The matching of modular components of the project with right set of individuals is a fundamental challenge in both commercial and open source software projects. However, most of the extant studies on team formation have only considered the problem of creating flat teams, i.e., teams without communities and central authorities. In this paper, we study the problem of forming a hierarchically structured team. We use tree structure to model both teams and task specifications and introduce the notion of sub-team. Next, we define local density to minimize communication costs in sub-teams. Then, two algorithms are proposed to address this team formation problem in bottom up and top down manners. Furthermore, sub-teams are pre-computed and indexed to facilitate online formation of large teams. Results of experiments with a large dataset suggest that the index based algorithm can achieve both good effectiveness and excellent efficiency.