Developer-Centric Task Allocation: An Intelligent Approach for Enhanced Software Productivity

Software projects are affected by technical knowledge as well as the personality of the team. Such factors can reduce or increase the software quality and development speed. For successful task allocation, it is essential to consider the skills and profile of each developer, thus maximizing their productivity. In projects with large teams, task allocation can be challenging, and the help of tools can facilitate its execution. In this work, we propose an intelligent approach for allocating software development tasks suitable to the profile of developers. From the literature, we define the appropriate skills and technical profiles for a development team, and the assessment is based on the developer completing a questionnaire. We developed a recommendation system to suggest tasks to be allocated to developers, employing text processing techniques. For validation, 495 tasks were used from an actual project developing simulator software for military training. The recommended allocations were evaluated by the project developers and used to improve the system. Validations showed that the developed approach makes consistent and coherent task recommendations to developers according to the developer profile, as participants agree with the recommendation for 76% of tasks.