In the decade and a half we have been together, I learned from my wife a few things on software engineering research.

A very widely cited works is Who should fix this bug:

Anvik, John, Lyndon Hiew, and Gail C. Murphy. "Who should fix this bug?." Proceedings of the 28th international conference on Software engineering. 2006.


This paper has received 1,300+ citations and it is regarded as one of the most clear "useful" ideas coming from software engineering research. It uses machine learning to recommend developers for working on different software defects.

The paper came in 2006, that is, 14 years ago and still I don't see this functionality available on Bugzilla, Trac, or GitLab (just to name few popular FLOSS issue-tracking systems).

Proprietary solutions such as GitHub might be getting such tooling soon, particularly since GitHub acquisition of Pull Panda. This idea refers to packaging and deploying Anvik et al (2006) to a FLOSS issue-tracking system, either as core functionality or as a plugin (although GitLab is not very keen on plugins).