A collaborative software development model based on formal concept analysis and stable matching

As the world shrinks into a global village, software development processes seek cooperation from multiple teams that are spread across the globe and possess their own unique capabilities and skills. Studies indicate that the Collaborative Software Development model has several advantages such as increased productivity and cost efficiency. However, it also poses the challenge of coordination and task assignment between dispersed and heterogeneous teams. In this paper, we propose a Formal Concept Analysis based model for skills oriented mapping between disparate teams and a set of software development tasks within a distributed and collaborative software development environment in a manner that is efficient, economical and fault-tolerant. Concepts extracted in the form of teams exhibiting common skills and software development tasks requiring specific skills are matched by using an extended version of the Stable Marriage Problem. The stable pairs so obtained are subsequently pruned with the objective of either minimizing the cost of allocation or maximizing the continuity of tasks. We also assess the redundancy for each task. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of our approach.