The ability of a programmer is an important factor that directly affects the quality of software. In this study, a method to forecast the programmer's ability from the questionnaire asking the programmer's life style using MTS approach. 153 examinees participated to write simple programs and answered the questions regarding their life style. From the results, a base space and the Mahalanobis distance from the abnormal data was calculated using Schmidt's orthogonal expansion.
As a result, it was concluded that regarding the judgment of the direction of abnormality(i.e., abnormal in good direction or abnormal in bad direction), it is better to use individual item rather than using the whole items in the questionnaire. In other words, SN ratio was used to evaluate the linearity of individual item and select those items with high linearity. But doing this way, it became possible to forecast the programmer's ability.