Measuring Developers' Expertise Based on Version Control Data

Developers' fluctuation in the lifetime of a software product might deteriorate the understanding of the source code to a level where developer expertise of some modules drops to a dangerously low point. It is important for the project management to identify such critical modules to avoid complete knowledge loss. This paper presents a developer-centered static analysis tool that is intended to show individual expertise in large software projects. The expertise value is computed for each file through repository mining of the version control system of the project. The calculated value is based on the quality of commits per developer. The results of the proposed method have been validated on the CodeChecker open-source project, comparing against the findings of a user questionnaire filled by developers of the project on their expertise.