Identifying reputable contributors in collaborative software development platforms

The collaborative nature of software development helped in the emergence of several online collaborative software development platforms (CSDPs). These platforms enable distributed teams of contributors to participate in the development of the various hosted projects. In such a context, the identification of relevant contributors is very important for handling efficiently the abundant requirements. This is quite essential for achieving a successful requirements engineering process, and hence a successful software project. However, this can be really challenging because of the fairly large number of involved contributors, especially in some distinguished projects. Moreover, the contributor profiles on a CSDP are often inadequately informative, which makes them an unqualified resource for learning about the contributors. In this paper, we propose to identify contributors by their reputation on a CSDP. Our approach calculates reputation scores using a belief calculus, called subjective logic, according to contributors´ performed roles. Knowing the reputation of anonymous contributors would enable project members to reduce the uncertainty in their future interactions with them. Moreover, we use concept lattices to classify contributors by their reputation scores, which enable us to have a comparable view on the considered contributors. Consequently, we can produce a roadmap to examine new requirements thus supporting their effective communication and prioritization.