Non-invasive software process data collection for expert identification

Software companies depend heavily on knowledgeable employees. Competence and skills management are essential instruments to understand how to employ the available skills in an optimal way. Unfortunately, implementing knowledge management strategies like competence and skills management is challenging because resources, time and effort are required before benefits become visible. This paper shows an approach to collect noninvasively (i.e., without requiring any effort by developers) data about “who” is working on “what” during software production. We present two examples to show how to answer three questions: “who is the expert of a specific part of the code?”, “who should do pair programming with whom?”, and “what knowledge gap arises if a specific developer leaves?”.