Should I Bug You? Identifying Domain Experts in Software Projects Using Code Complexity Metrics

TL;DR

This paper presents a framework that uses code complexity metrics over time to identify and recommend software project experts, helping teams understand expertise distribution and address knowledge gaps.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to elicit developer expertise through complexity analysis and demonstrates its effectiveness in real-world settings.

Findings

Over 90% of identified experts were rated as acceptable candidates by developers.

Aggregated code metrics effectively identify domain experts.

The approach helps detect areas with few or no experts for proactive knowledge management.

Abstract

In any sufficiently complex software system there are experts, having a deeper understanding of parts of the system than others. However, it is not always clear who these experts are and which particular parts of the system they can provide help with. We propose a framework to elicit the expertise of developers and recommend experts by analyzing complexity measures over time. Furthermore, teams can detect those parts of the software for which currently no, or only few experts exist and take preventive actions to keep the collective code knowledge and ownership high. We employed the developed approach at a medium-sized company. The results were evaluated with a survey, comparing the perceived and the computed expertise of developers. We show that aggregated code metrics can be used to identify experts for different software components. The identified experts were rated as acceptable candidates by developers in over 90% of all cases.