Developing an h-index for OSS developers

TitleDeveloping an h-index for OSS developers
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2012
AuthorsCapiluppi, A, Serebrenik, A, Youssef, A
Secondary Title2012 9th IEEE Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR)
Pagination251 - 254
PublisherIEEE
Place PublishedZurich
ISBN Number978-1-4673-1760-3
Abstract

The public data available in Open Source Software (OSS) repositories has been used for many practical reasons: detecting community structures; identifying key roles among developers; understanding software quality; predicting the arousal of bugs in large OSS systems, and so on; but also to formulate and validate new metrics and proof-of-concepts on general, non-OSS specific, software engineering aspects. One of the results that has not emerged yet from the analysis of OSS repositories is how to help the “career advancement” of developers: given the available data on products and processes used in OSS development, it should be possible to produce measurements to identify and describe a developer, that could be used externally as a measure of recognition and experience. This paper builds on top of the h-index, used in academic contexts, and which is used to determine the recognition of a researcher among her peers. By creating similar indices for OSS (or any) developers, this work could help defining a baseline for measuring and comparing the contributions of OSS developers in an objective, open and reproducible way.

DOI10.1109/MSR.2012.6224288
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