Ohloh Tracks Open Source Developers 115
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."
sounds familiar (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Flawed, but interesting. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Number of commits? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:So What Metrics Do You Suggest? (Score:3, Informative)
Software development metrics are not worthless. They are, however, seriously misunderstood. This is partly why we built Ohloh to focus on Open Source: it's the world's largest testbed of available software development metrics.
One challenge to interpreting development metrics is having a clue about what is 'normal'. Just knowing your FOOBAZ count is X doesn't help much. Once you can compare your FOOBAZ count to 100k other developers, it may begin to give you some helpful perspective. Of course, relying on a single metric is myopic - which is why we offer comment ratio, language breakdown etc...
Btw, I agree that human opinion plays a vital role. That's why we also enable people hand out 'Kudos' to their peers - to acknowledge human judgement as well. The Kudo scores are then evaluated using a PageRank-inspired algorithm across all open source contributors.
Re:So What Metrics Do You Suggest? (Score:2, Informative)