An ontology-based approach with which to assign human resources to software projects

Human resources play a critical role in the success of software projects. Ensuring the correct assignment of them to a specific project is, therefore, an immediate requirement for Software development organizations. Within this context, this work explores the use of ontologies in the building of a decision support system that will help human resources managers or project leaders to select those employees who are best suited to participating in a new software development project. Ontologies allow the system to discover semantic relatedness among new and previous software projects by means of its requirements specification. The system can, therefore, suggest those people who have participated on similar projects. We have proved the effectiveness of our approach by conducting an evaluation in a software development organization. Our findings confirm the success of our approach and reveal that it may bring considerable benefits to the software development process.