ProjectUser Search algorithm

[CGA1123]

WE NEED TO CREATE THE SEARCHY ALGORITHMO, IT WILL BE MUCH MAGICO WOOOOOOOO 🔍 Need to wait on #124 #125 to be implemented

[JAPTaylor]

By the way, on top of skills and locations, the spec also mentions:

• Availability taking into account annual leave, sickness, currently utilisation on one or more projects, etc.
• Job Roles

[JAPTaylor]

It might also be a good idea to factor in whether they've worked in a similar role in the past

[CGA1123]

Nice. True, A 'Role History' might be something thats interesting to try and implement into the a users profiles, not sure exactly how that would work though.

For the Availability we'll need some sort of calendar?

[JAPTaylor]

Okay, so the general ideas for the search, as discussed earlier in the meeting, would be these:

• First, any specified 'required' properties, such as skills marked essential, would be used to narrow the search down.

• 'Recommended' properties, such as skills not marked as essential, would be used to rank the remaining users.

• The order of the returned users would be determined partially by input from the searcher, i.e. choosing what they think is more important: location, skills, etc.

• Locations would be set to either Required or recommended by the searcher at the start of the search, which will determine whether users who's location is not in the list will be eliminated from the search, or just be ordered lower down on the list.

• We weren't quite sure how to order the users if, for example, one has 2/4 recommended skills but has a recommended location, and another has 4/4 recommended skills but does not have a recommended location. I think we were leaning towards using the search preferences specified by the user,so if skills was chosen ahead of location, then 4/4 skills would take precedence, but if locations was specified as being more important, then having the right location would take precedence over having more skills.

• If no users match the required results, we could either:

  • ask the user to enter new search criteria. This is the option we leaned towards, I think.
  • Return nothing
  • Automatically widen the search criteria by setting some required criteria to be recommended instead.

[CGA1123]

Might be an idea to remove the rating attribute from ProjectRoleSkill. It's not actually very useful, we can rank users based on the total of their rating score over all the Skills asked for by the role.

Taking the rating of the ProjectRoleSkill seems to me to just add unnecessary complexity.

[JAPTaylor]

Hmm. Maybe. I won't factor it in with the search for now, but I don't think we should remove it quite yet; I want to see how well making the search goes first.

[JAPTaylor]

We should still allow for manually searching a name and adding a user without using the intelligent search, right?

[CGA1123]

Yeah, manual search should still be possible

[CGA1123]

Basic functionality added #156