Construction of the Collaboration Skills Knowledge in Software Development

Most of the resources involved in software development are human resources. The software development teams in Japan face various problems. One of these problems is miscasting. When the project managers decide about the staffing of team members, they must understand the collaboration skills of the members for the smooth execution of the project. However, there is no method to measure the collaboration skills of the team members objectively. Thus, there are projects that end in failure because of miscasting.Therefore, it was attempted to measure the collaboration skills and to construct a knowledge base. The knowledge base construction was based on the past interview records. This paper reports the results of a trial in a software development project, in which the collaboration skills of members were discriminated by using interview reports. The interviews with members were conducted by the project manager from the time of project start-up. The records pertinent to the members who had been active as the then current leaders were extracted. These records were used as a knowledge for collaboration skills. This knowledge was defined as Collaboration Skills Knowledge (CS Knowledge). The discriminant analysis in machine learning with CS Knowledge was performed. As a result of the analysis, discrimination rate of collaboration skills was 81%.