An Expert Recommendation System for Design Decision Making: Who Should be Involved in Making a Design Decision?

Abstract

In large software engineering projects, designing software systems is a collaborative decision-making process where a group of architects and developers make design decisions on how to address design concerns by discussing alternative design solutions. For the decision-making process, involving appropriate individuals requires objectivity and awareness about their expertise. In this paper, we propose a novel expert recommendation system that identifies individuals who could be involved in tackling new design concerns in software engineering projects. The approach behind the proposed system addresses challenges such as identifying architectural skills, quantifying architectural expertise of architects and developers, and finally matching and recommending individuals with suitable expertise to discuss new design concerns. To validate our approach, a quantitative evaluation of the recommendation system was performed using design decisions from four software engineering projects. The evaluation not only indicates that individuals with architectural expertise can be identified for design decision making but also provides quantitative evidence for the existence of personal experience bias during the decision-making process.