# Identifying Experts in Software Libraries and Frameworks among GitHub Users

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.08113 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08113/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 19 Mar 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [GiveMeLabeledIssues: An Open Source Issue Recommendation System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13418/) (2023)
- [Dev2vec: Representing Domain Expertise of Developers in an Embedding Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05132/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Software development increasingly depends on libraries and frameworks to increase productivity and reduce time-to-market. Despite this fact, we still lack techniques to assess developers expertise in widely popular libraries and frameworks. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of unsupervised (based on clustering) and supervised machine learning classifiers (Random Forest and SVM) to identify experts in three popular JavaScript libraries: facebook/react, mongodb/node-mongodb, and socketio/socket.io. First, we collect 13 features about developers activity on GitHub projects, including commits on source code files that depend on these libraries. We also build a ground truth including the expertise of 575 developers on the studied libraries, as self-reported by them in a survey. Based on our findings, we document the challenges of using machine learning classifiers to predict expertise in software libraries, using features extracted from GitHub. Then, we propose a method to identify library experts based on clustering feature data from GitHub; by triangulating the results of this method with information available on Linkedin profiles, we show that it is able to recommend dozens of GitHub users with evidences of being experts in the studied JavaScript libraries. We also provide a public dataset with the expertise of 575 developers on the studied libraries.