Gary L. Jedynak - Assessing Expertise: A practical way to determine competence as it might benefit the individual programmer and the formation of a more capable team.

December 1, 2005

Location: University of Minnesota, EE/CS Building - Room 3 - 111

Program Manager: Paul Kraska / Gary Jedynak

Topic: Assessing Expertise: A practical way to determine competence as it might benefit the individual programmer and the formation of a more capable team.

Speaker: Gary L. Jedynak, Consultant in Process Development and Software Quality Assurance, Summerhill Associates, LLC., Minneapolis.

Abstract:

Paradoxically the individual programmer is the most important part of the team, yet individual competence has yet to become as understandable as many have speculated it ought to be. After explaining what is meant by expertise, and how assessment is different than certification testing, this presentation suggests an alternative to certification. Based on a proven approach in assessment of competence the approach is called, ‘Behaviorally Anchored Self-Assessment’ (BASA). A simple demonstration will be done to show how it works and an online application for assessment Java expertise will be provided as proof of principle. An explanation of the methodology and its use in a commercial environment will be chronicled.

Several key problems are addressed:

1. How might we assess expertise accurately, quickly, and acceptably?
2. How might the individual make effective use of such self-knowledge to increase their programming capability?
3. How might teams be formed more rapidly and easily, and yet increase confidence in project outcome given the potentially high impact of each member on the team performance?

This overall approach suggests that the complex problem of quantifying expertise can be made much simpler by having the individuals responsible for their own assessment. While this seems to be likely to produce inflated results, it turns out from a decade of use, technically skilled people do in fact self-assess quite accurately. Also such team-wide self-assessment reduces common concerns about compensation and career development

Gary Jedynak Bio:

Gary Jedynak is an independent consultant with Summerhill Associates, which specializes in HR and Quality Assurance services. He has worked in manufacturing and software quality assurance in many technologies ranging from avionics to e-learning. He is the originator of the BASA implementation, which uses a ‘strong inference’ technique, making it practical in commercial environments. Working with Elaine Pattison of Summerhill, they demonstrated effectiveness of the approach during a ten-year period, and subsequently received recognition from a legal publication, which cited the BASA approach as a plausible solution to employee dissatisfaction and litigation with standard performance reviews. He is also co-founder of C4DSD, the Collaborative for Distributed Software Development, where BASA is being further developed as an enabling technology to the problems of distributed team formation and related distributed processes. He has a BSEE from the University of Michigan.

The following files related to this event are available for download:

Assessing Expertise presentation
Type: application/pdf, Size: 2656 KB
Description: Assessing Expertise: A practical way to determine competence as it might benefit the individual programmer and the formation of a more capable team