MSc Thesis Proposal by: Najia Shinneeb
Date: Thursday, January 22, 2026
Time: 12:30 pm
Location: Online
Abstract:
Open-source software (OSS) development plays a foundational role in modern software production by enabling large-scale, distributed collaboration through publicly accessible source code. Despite its success, many OSS projects struggle to sustain contributors and form effective development teams, with team-related challenges accounting for a substantial proportion of project failures. Because OSS projects rely heavily on voluntary participation, identifying effective team compositions with balanced expertise is a key determinant of project success. This challenge is commonly formalized as the team formation problem (TFP), an NP-hard optimization problem that aims to identify an appropriate subset of contributors capable of satisfying project requirements.
This thesis addresses the TFP in OSS projects using computational intelligence techniques and proposes a novel evolutionary optimization framework based on cultural algorithms. The proposed approach includes a dual inheritance system consisting of population and a shared belief space, that captures knowledge from a set of elite solutions, to guide the search toward effective team compositions. Multiple strategies for belief space updating will be explored, and team quality is assessed using a newly introduced fitness function incorporating risk related to OSS projects.
Thesis Committee:
Internal Reader: Dr. Muhammad Asaduzzaman
Internal Reader: Dr. Sherif Saad
Advisor: Dr. Pooya Moradian Zadeh
Chair: