Evaluating and predicting developers' contribution in software projects

Abstract

Nowadays the software development industry is growing rapidly as well as the popularity of the distance work. Hence there are a lot of big software teams scattered all over the world and it might be very important for a team leader to monitor the performance and general working style of their team members. In this thesis work, the system to evaluate and predict software developers’ performance based on the pure information from a version control system is presented. During development of the system three main tasks have been solved: creation of an environment, which retrieves information from the version control system and visualizes it, development of a formula to evaluate developers’ contribution to the project, and creation of a prediction tool. The developer’s contribution formula creation included two steps. Сollecting possible metrics which might indicate developer’s performance and then series of experiments on different projects to construct a formula from the most suitable ones. After the formula finalization it became possible to calculate precise developer’s contributions and visualize them as plots over a custom period. The prediction tool was required to construct a continuation of this curve over the next period of the same length. Two hypotheses have been tested: fitting the curve and the neural network approach. The neural network appeared to be the best solution, as it works more stable and guesses the curve scale and form properly. The final system takes two parameters as input: a git repository and time period we are interested in. As a result, it produces the plots for all developers: constructed from their contribution over the target period and a predicted contribution for the future period of the same length. As further research options, different additional metrics, that could be included to make contribution evaluation formula more precise can be proposed. However, the prediction part can be considered good enough and doesn’t require additional development or research, as it already fits the initial requirements rather good. Overall, the research was considered successful as an initial goal of creating a basic version of a software to evaluate and predict developer’s contribution was achieved.