Using Developer Interaction Data to Compare Expertise Metrics

The expertise of a software developer is said to be
a crucial factor for the development time required to complete
a task. Even if this hypothesis is intuitive, research has not yet
quantified the effect of developer expertise on development time.
A related problem is that the design space for expertise metrics is
large; out of the various automated expertise metrics proposed,
we do not know which metric most reliably captures expertise.
What prevents a proper evaluation of expertise metrics and
their relation with development time is the lack of data on
development tasks, such as their precise duration. Fortunately,
this data is starting to become available in the form of growing
developer interaction repositories. We show that applying MSR
techniques to these developer interaction repositories gives us the
necessary tools to perform such an evaluation.