Automatically Modeling Developer Programming Ability and Interest Across Software Communities

Abstract

Developer profile plays an important role in software project planning, developer recommendation, personnel training, and other tasks. Modeling the ability and interest of developers is its key issue. However, most existing approaches require manual assessment, like 360[Formula: see text] performance evaluation. With the emergence of social networking sites such as StackOverflow and Github, a vast amount of developer information is created on a daily basis. Such personal and social context data has huge potential to support automatic and effective developer ability evaluation and interest mining. In this paper, we propose CPDScorer, a novel approach for modeling and scoring the programming ability and interest of developers through mining heterogeneous information from both community question answering (CQA) sites and open-source software (OSS) communities. CPDScorer analyzes the questions and answers posted in CQA sites, and evaluates the projects submitted in OSS communities to assign expertise scores as well as interest scores to developers, considering both the quantitative and qualitative factors. When profiling developer's ability and interest, a programming term extraction algorithm is also designed based on set covering. We have conducted experiments on StackOverflow and Github to measure the effectiveness of CPDScorer. The results show that our approach is feasible and practical in user programming ability and interest modeling. In particular, the precision of our approach reaches 80%.