Scaling up a programmers’ profile tool

Abstract

The style of programming, the proficiency on the programming language, the conciseness of the solution, the use of comments and so on, allow comparison of programmers through static analysis of their code. The Programmer Profiler Tool, which has been commonly named PP Tool, is an open source profiling tool for Java language where the programmer’s ability can be classified in one out of five possible profiles and the distinction among them falls upon the levels of both skill and readability. Taking a set of correct solutions the comparison between solutions for the same problems is fundamental to evaluate proficiency on the analysed criteria. As such, there was a need to tune the tool in order to handle, simultaneously, with a bigger amount of programs and with a wider scope of solutions. By scaling up PP Tool it will be possible to apply it in a far wider scope of situations as it will be able to cope with programmers from different geographies, with or without formal education, between 1 and 20 years of experience amongst other factors. For that, a set of features were implemented and tested and are described in this paper.