Taketo Tsunoda, Hironori Washizaki, Fukazawa Yosiaki, Inoue Sakae, Yosiiku Hanai and Kanazawa Masanobu, “Evaluating the Work of Experienced and Inexperienced Developers Considering Work Difficulty in Software Development,” 18th IEEE/ACIS International Conference on Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Networking and Parallel/Distributed Computing, June 26-28, 2017, Kanazawa, Japan. (to appear)(CORE Rank C)

Previous studies have researched how developer experience affects code quality, but they ignore work difficulty, although experienced developers are more likely to work on the more complex parts of a project. To examine work difficulty, we focus on revised files. Using product metrics, we evaluate file complexity in each type of file origin. Specifically, we analyze three large commercial projects (each project has about 250,000 LOC) executed by the same organization to analyze the relationship between previous project experience and developer’s work. Although experienced developers do not always work on more complicated files, they introduce fewer defects, especially if the difference in work difficulty is not significant.