Developers' Game: A Preliminary Study Concerning a Tool for Automated Developers Assessment

These days, despite dynamic development of the software industry there is still no proven and accurate assessment method of developers' performance. Current solutions are based on limited set of factors that can be easily measured by managers, such as the number of hours worked, issues closed, or lines of code written. However, there is more than that: developers write code of better or worse quality, they perform code reviews and code refactorings. To answer these needs we have created the Code Review Analyzer (CRA) tool that uses information gathered in code review platforms to assess developers based on their work style. Among others, it collects information on commits frequency, number of code review rejections and code reviews performed. This information is used to calculate developers performance in a continuous manner and to introduce gamification techniques into the team space by providing developers with their ranking and awarding them with various achievement badges. Afterwards, the tool was experimentally evaluated in order to prove the evaluation accuracy but also to verify the motivational impact of the gamification techniques. The CRA tool demonstration can be seen at https://youtu.be/dUFFxCeH-ok.