Identifying Developers' Expertise in Social Coding Platforms

Social coding platforms provide a means for software developers to acquire hands-on development experience. Their source code contributions can be used to showcase their expertise and skills in specific areas of software development to the community and potential employers. Therefore, quantifying developers' expertise based on their overall development activity can be used to provide a clear view of their experience and competencies, that is otherwise scattered across different software projects. In this paper we propose an approach that extracts developers' expertise in different programming languages. Our approach measures developers' commit activity on GitHub by considering both the quantity and the continuity of their contributions in isolated projects through time. We evaluate the generated developers' expertise profiles against recognized answering activity in Stack Overflow via a dataset of users that are active both in GitHub and Stack Overflow.

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