Project Proposal

Mission Statement

Develop a system that can compile together the skill sets of individual employees to enable discoverability of who can do what. This skill set compilation would ideally be an automatic process whereby JIRA projects, BitBucket Repositories, etc are scraped for information that would be able to form a profile on what employees have worked on and what skills they posses.

Additionally, the system could take the further step of helping identify which projects are being worked on by who, and which projects are not actively being worked on.

Motivation

The department (really, any department) seems to have the problem of not really knowing who’s working on what, as well as not knowing who has certain technological expertise. As such, it is difficult to know who to go for when trying to find help with certain problems.

The other motivation is knowing what projects are currently being actively worked on, as well as those that aren't. Having insight into who's working on what could be beneficial for scheduling and resourcing other projects.

Benefits

This system would be able to help the department in multiple ways.

• Firstly, it would aid managers when planning resourcing for new projects; they could more effectively find employees with the skill sets they need for the project at hand.
• Secondly, it would help other employees with finding who they could go to for help when they run into problems.

Risks

There are a number of potential risks with a project of this type.

• If we can't get the appropriate level of access that is needed to query the Jira/Bitbucket/etc APIs, then the project is rather useless.
• There are risks in being able to parse the Jira/Bitbucket/etc information into meaningful sets of 'skills', but this should be feasible.
• Scope creep for this sort of thing can get out of hand rather fast. Since we're basically building a pseudo social network, all of the 'features' of a social network could creep in, unless we are steadfast in maintaining a baseline set of features.
• The APIs are different between the Cloud and On-Premise versions of JIRA and Bitbucket. Assuming the modules we create for accessing these systems is modular enough, then this should be of little concern, assuming the features we need are available in both sets of APIs.

Alternatives

• LinkedIn. Although social networks like LinkedIn exist, it can be inefficient to have to map a given list of known employees to their LinkedIn profiles and then search for relevant skill sets. It would require the person to already be connected with everyone at the workplace to look for people that possess the skill that they are looking for. This application would already have a database of all the employees, determine the skill sets, and allow for easy access to the this information.
• Skills Base - Skills management software. Similar idea to ours, except they have a more manual flow where employees have to sign themselves up and enter their skills and their levels of competency. Provides a much more data-driven, analytic kind of view where skill competency ratings is a big part of the application.

Things to Clarify

• Is it at all feasible to get Jira admin access (through a service account)?
• Is it at all feasible to get Bitbucket admin access (through a service account)?
• Is Jira Cloud or On-prem?
• Is Bitbucket Cloud or On-prem?
• Are Jira projects linked to Bitbucket projects in any way?
• Is there a centralized user account system that we can pull details from? (i.e. AD) (i.e. is it at all feasible to get access to it?)