Most crowdsourced software development platforms adopt contest paradigm to solicit contributions from the community. To attain competitiveness in complex tasks, crowdsourced software developers often choose to work with others collaboratively. However, existing crowdsourcing platforms generally assume independent contributions from developers and do not provide effective support for team formation. Prior studies on team recommendation aim at optimizing task outcomes by recommending the most suitable team for a task instead of finding appropriate collaborators for a specific person. In this work, we are concerned with teammate recommendation for crowdsourcing developers. First, we present the results of an empirical study of Kaggle, which shows that developers’personal teammate preferences are mainly affected by three factors. Second, we give a collaboration willingness model to characterize developers’ teammate preferences and formulate teammate recommendation as an optimization problem. Then we design a heuristic algorithm to find suitable teammates for a developer. Finally, we have conducted a set of experiments on a Kaggle dataset to evaluate the effectiveness of our approach.

Finding suitable developers for a given task is critical and challenging for successful crowdsourcing software development. In practice, the development skills will be improved as developers accomplish more development tasks. Prior studies on crowdsourcing developer recommendation do not consider the changing of skills, which can underestimate developers' skills to fulfill a task. In this work, we first conducted an empirical study of the performance of 74 developers on Topcoder. With a difficulty-weighted algorithm, we re-compute the scores of each developer by eliminating the effect of task difficulty from the performance. We find out that the skill improvement of Topcoder developers can be fitted well with the negative exponential learning curve model. Second, we design a skill prediction method based on the learning curve. Then we propose a skill improvement aware framework for recommending developers for software development with crowdsourcing.