Understanding and leveraging developer inexpertise

Abstract

Existing work in modeling developer expertise assumes that developers reflect their expertise in their contributions and that such expertise can be analyzed to provide support for developer tasks. However, developers also make contributions in which they reflect their inexpertise such as by making mistakes in their code. We refine the hypotheses of the expertise-identification literature by proposing developer inexpertise as a factor that should be modeled to automate support for developer tasks.