Ohloh Tracks Open Source Developers

eldavojohn writes "The startup company Ohloh has a database listing 70,000 developers working on 11,000 open source projects. Their aim is to 'rank' open source developers, which raises some interesting questions about exactly how useful this tracking company is. Questions like, 'Is there an accurate way beyond word of mouth to measure the importance and skill of a developer?' I found it slightly alarming that, to this site, the number of commits (with input from the number of kudos) tells how good a developer you are."

Comments

Accurate? Not for me

[mrslacker]

I don't know how representative it is, or if it might improve over time, but I looked myself up.

I found mentions in 5 projects - _except_ they're all just versions of 2.6 kernel source with the same contribution for an obscure TV card cx88 variant I did. In practice, I'm sure I'm hardly alone in having contributions (mostly in small ways, but sometimes very considerably) to over 100 projects over the years. I guess I have to go through and add some of those projects.

Naw, CBA. At least I can make sure my resume is accurate.

So What Metrics Do You Suggest?

[eldavojohn]

I'm sure I'm hardly alone in having contributions (mostly in small ways, but sometimes very considerably) to over 100 projects over the years. I also don't think you're alone in finding that metrics fail to measure good programmers. My boss constantly asks me for lines of code count from developers. No matter how many times I express this to him, this is not a measure of success or of how good a coder you are.

I tried to think of metrics to relay up the chain (a special thank you to the stat-scm goal in maven) but I come up with some pretty lame ones:

• Code to comment ratio is desired at 1:1 (at least in the commercial world)
• A class/method/function/procedure/module desired size should be defined and rated
• # of Unit tests

As you can see these are the ones that I found could be automatically gathered. And even these have exceptions. Anything else I think of either takes too much time to gather or is subjective. This is tough, I would like to default to peer review but oftentimes I find teammates voicing their personal hatred for an individual or taking into account personal qualities when ranking a developer. Real Life Example: Teammate A is from MIT and teammate B thinks everyone from MIT is a god. Unfortunately Teammate A hasn't done anything but criticize everyone's code without any constructive comments to make it better.

I submitted this story hoping it would open dialog on measuring coding abilities in a semi-automated way.

Number of commits?

[Tarlus]

So in other words, I could commit some of my own code to a CVS repository, find some errors that I missed, fix them, commit it again, decide to add more comments, commit it again, find one more thing I probably could have done differently and then rewrite it, commit it again...

And I would be ranked highly as a great developer?

Re:commits

[krog]

It's as good a measure as any.

You might be right, but it still sucks. And in the case when all your solutions are crap, I think it's dishonest to present any of them as actual, workable solutions.