Representation of Developer Expertise

Developer expertise is generally represented by "years of experience", which is generally useless. Does someone have 10 years of experience, or 1 year of experience 10 times over?

The process and product data collected by Hackystat has the potential to provide a much richer and more meaningful representation of developer expertise. Let's restrict ourselves to the domain of Java software development, for the sake of discussion. First, let's consider the kinds of data we could potentially collect as a developer works:

• When they are working on a Java system.
• The packages imported by the class that they are editing.
• The IDE they are using.
• The IDE features (debugger, build system, refactoring, configuration management) they are using.
• Their behaviors within the IDE (writing tests, writing production code, running the system, running the debugger, running tests, invoking the build system, etc.)
• Their configuration management behavior: frequency of commits, degree of churn; conflicts.
  
• The number of developers associated with their current project.
• The level of interdependency between developers: are files worked on by multiple developers? Has the developer ever worked on code written by someone else? Has someone else ever worked on code written by this developer?

I believe that capturing this kind of information can provide a much richer and more useful representation of developer expertise. It can provide information useful to determining:

• Who has experience with a particular tool/technique?
• Who has complementary skills to my own?
• Who has recent experience with a given tool/technique?

At a higher level, this information could also be useful in forming groups, by helping identify developers with similar and/or complementary skills.

Important research issues include providing the developer with "control" over their profile, how to display this information, and how to perform queries.