Newcomers’ Barriers. . . Is That All? An Analysis of Mentors’ and Newcomers’ Barriers in OSS Projects

Balali, Sogol; Steinmacher, Igor; Annamalai, Umayal; Sarma, Anita; Gerosa, Marco Aurélio

doi:10.1007/s10606-018-9310-8

Cited by 88 publications

(111 citation statements)

References 62 publications

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“…Some of our recurring mentors have shown some signs of 'GSoC fatigue,' (...) let's have a summer to ourselves to recover (...) and come back next year." As previous research has shown that mentors themselves also face barriers [53], our findings may-to some degree-assist mentors by showing what aspects of GSoC the students are most interested in.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 51%

Google summer of code: Student motivations and contributions

Silva

Wiese

Germán

et al. 2020

Journal of Systems and Software

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Several open source software (OSS) projects expect to foster newcomers' onboarding and to receive contributions by participating in engagement programs, like Summers of Code. However, there is little empirical evidence showing why students join such programs. In this paper, we study the well-established Google Summer of Code (GSoC), which is a 3-month OSS engagement program that offers stipends and mentors to students willing to contribute to OSS projects. We combined a survey (students and mentors) and interviews (students) to understand what motivates students to enter GSoC. Our results show that students enter GSoC for an enriching experience, not necessarily to become frequent contributors. Our data suggest that, while the stipends are an important motivator, the students participate for work experience and the ability to attach the name of the supporting organization to their resumés. We also discuss practical implications for students, mentors, OSS projects, and Summer of Code programs.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 51%

Google summer of code: Student motivations and contributions

Silva

Wiese

Germán

et al. 2020

Journal of Systems and Software

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“…While the authors did not systematically pursue the question of project attractiveness to potential contributors, their ndings are relevant to our research question, as some of the signals and corresponding project qualities their study uncovered could impact people's decisions to contribute to a project. Specically, Dabbish et al found that: (i) the recency of activity in a project signals project liveness and maintenance; (ii) the amount of attention a project receives, as indicated by the number of stars and watchers, signals artifact importance, project quality, and community support; (iii) a high number of open pull requests signals low conscientiousness in dealing with external contributors; and (iv) the number 122: 6 Huilian Sophie Qiu et al…”

Section: Prior Empirical Evidence On How People Choose Projectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…P14 also pointed out that it is nice that "It says 'please ask rst' because otherwise people might feel that the pull requests always have to be merged in" (P14). Thorough contributing guidelines may lower the barrier of lacking knowledge about procedures and conventions, identied by Balali et al [6]. Contributing guidelines should also explain the GH jargon, e.g., "a lot of new people who don't know GH don't necessarily know what the issue tracker was" (P14).…”

Section: Contributing Guidelinesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…One participant told us that "This project has a code of conduct, and they've adopted the standard contributor covenant. 6 So my belief is that this would be a welcoming community because people are conscious of having a code of conduct" (P2). Being kind to contributors has been encouraged by many people and organizations.…”

Section: Community Opennessmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The eect sizes are, however, relatively small: taken together, the four variables explain ' 9% of the total variance explained by the model. It is not surprising that being impolite correlates with lower likelihood of attracting new contributors: Balali et al [6] found that a "harsh project atmosphere" is one of the main barriers that a newcomer faces. However, it is surprising that having a website URL, contributing guidelines, and issue labels correlates with lower likelihood of attracting new contributors.…”

Section: Aracting Any New Contributorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

The Signals that Potential Contributors Look for When Choosing Open-source Projects

Qiu

Padala

et al. 2019

Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact.

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While open-source software has become ubiquitous, its sustainability is in question: without a constant supply of contributor eort, open-source projects are at risk. While prior work has extensively studied the motivations of open-source contributors in general, relatively little is known about how people choose which project to contribute to, beyond personal interest. This question is especially relevant in transparent social coding environments like GH, where visible cues on personal prole and repository pages, known as signals, are known to impact impression formation and decision making. In this paper, we report on a mixed-methods empirical study of the signals that inuence the contributors' decision to join a GH project. We rst interviewed 15 GH contributors about their project evaluation processes and identied the important signals they used, including the structure of the README and the amount of recent activity. Then, we proceeded quantitatively to test out the impact of each signal based on the data of 9,977 GH projects. We reveal that many important pieces of information lack easily observable signals, and that some signals may be both attractive and unattractive. Our ndings have direct implications for open-source maintainers and the design of social coding environments, e.g., features to be added to facilitate better project searching experience. CCS Concepts: • Software and its engineering → Collaboration in software development; Open source model;

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