Published in IET Software Received on 15th April 2010 Revised on 1st July 2010 doi: 10.1049/iet-sen.2010.0043 In Special Issue on Social Semantic Web Support for Software Development ISSN 1751-8806 Exploitation of social semantic technology for software development team configuration R. Valencia-Garcı ´ a F. Garcı ´ a-Sa ´ nchez D. Castellanos-Nieves J.T. Ferna ´ ndez-Breis A. Toval Departamento de Informa ´tica y Sistemas, Facultad de Informa ´ tica, Universidad de Murcia, Murcia CP 30100, Spain E-mail: valencia@um.es Abstract: Social networks are having a huge impact on how people socialise, gather information, stay informed and solve problems. As could be expected, this trend is influencing the area of software engineering at different levels. In software development, the amount of data available is becoming prohibitively overwhelming for analysis purposes with traditional techniques. As semantic technologies mature, they provide a consistent and reliable basis to handle large amounts of data. Besides, they enable added value, reasoning-based functionality to access such data in an automatic fashion. The authors present a system for supporting the design of teams for software development projects, which combines the benefits of semantics and social networks. The authors also propose a full-fledged solution backed with a proof-of-concept implementation that has been tested in the scope of small and medium enterprises (SME). 1 Introduction Software development is a predominantly social activity, and it is important to view development groups, departments and corporation as social entities [1]. Owing to the critical importance of teamwork in software engineering (SE), a vast amount of research on SE team formation has been proposed in last few years [2]. Keeping a record of the characteristics of previously completed software projects can improve the decision-making process. However, as the amount of information available grows, the effectiveness and efficiency of traditional search engines and data mining tools decrease drastically. Semantic technologies [3], on the other hand, are currently reaching a certain degree of maturity. They provide a consistent and reliable basis to face up to the challenges for organisation, manipulation and visualisation of data and knowledge. Consequently, the possibility of using knowledge-oriented query answering to exploit the benefits of semantics has become a top-class research challenge. Semantic technologies are currently being applied at different levels of the SE process [4, 5]. In particular, when it comes to dealing with a vast amount of information and improving precision and recall of search processes, working at the semantic level is essential. In line with this, the work presented here constitutes a social semantic platform that, given a new software project, is capable of automatically managing and suggesting the members of the staff who are best suited for participating in that software development project. This process is based on the reuse of existing vocabularies and ontologies. In fact, the platform deals with the management of a broader range of software-related information in a semantic manner, becoming a knowledge-based system for managing software development projects. In this work, the social capabilities of the system are related to how the user profiles are described and exploited. The rest of the paper is organised as follows. Section 2 contains an overview of the state-of-the-art of the technologies involved in this project. The components that take part in the platform and its overall architecture are described in Section 3. In Section 4, the validation of the platform is presented. Finally, conclusions and future work are outlined in Section 5. IET Softw., 2010, Vol. 4, Iss. 6, pp. 373–385 373 doi: 10.1049/iet-sen.2010.0043 & The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2010 www.ietdl.org