Do CONTRIBUTING files provide information about OSS newcomers' onboarding barriers?
Open Source Software projects provide onboarding guidelines in CONTRIBUTING files (e.g., CONTRIBUTING.md on GitHub). These files explain, for example, how to find open tasks, pack contributions, and submit code for review. However, these files often do not follow a standard structure, can be overly extensive, and miss barriers commonly found by newcomers. This paper proposes an automated approach to parse these CONTRIBUTING files and assess how they cover onboarding barriers. We manually classified a sample of CONTRIBUTING files according to a model of onboarding barriers from the literature, trained a machine learning classifier that automatically predicts the categories of each paragraph (precision: 0.655, recall: 0.662), and surveyed developers to investigate how adequate the predictions were from their perspective (75% of the predictions were considered adequate). We also found that CONTRIBUTING files typically do not cover the barriers newcomers face (52% of the analyzed projects were missing at least 3 out of the 6 barriers faced by newcomers; 84% missing at least 2). In particular, our analysis revealed that information about choosing a task and talking with the community, two of the most recurrent barriers newcomers face, are neglected in more than 75% of the projects. We made available our classifier as an online service capable of analyzing the content of a given CONTRIBUTING file. Our approach may help community builders identify missing information in the ecosystem of projects they maintain and newcomers to understand what to expect in CONTRIBUTING files.
Tue 5 DecDisplayed time zone: Pacific Time (US & Canada) change
11:00 - 12:30 | Human Aspects IResearch Papers / Journal First / Ideas, Visions and Reflections at Golden Gate A Chair(s): Preetha Chatterjee Drexel University, USA | ||
11:00 15mTalk | A Longitudinal Study of Student Contributions to OSS vs. OSS4SG with a Lightweight Intervention Research Papers Zihan Fang Vanderbilt University, Madeline Endres University of Michigan, Thomas Zimmermann Microsoft Research, Denae Ford Microsoft Research, Westley Weimer University of Michigan, Kevin Leach Vanderbilt University, Yu Huang Vanderbilt University Pre-print Media Attached | ||
11:15 15mTalk | Do CONTRIBUTING files provide information about OSS newcomers' onboarding barriers? Research Papers Felipe Fronchetti Virginia Commonwealth University, David C. Shepherd Louisiana State University, Igor Scaliante Wiese Federal University of Technology – Paraná - UTFPR, Christoph Treude University of Melbourne, Marco Gerosa Northern Arizona University, Igor Steinmacher Northern Arizona University Pre-print Media Attached | ||
11:30 15mTalk | Off to a Good Start: Dynamic Contribution Patterns and Technical Success in an OSS Newcomer’s Early Career Journal First Yang Yue University of California, Irvine, Yi Wang Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, David Redmiles University of California, Irvine Link to publication DOI Media Attached | ||
11:45 15mTalk | How Early Participation Determines Long-Term Sustained Activity in GitHub Projects? Research Papers Wenxin Xiao School of Computer Science, Peking University, Hao He Carnegie Mellon University, Weiwei Xu Peking University, Yuxia Zhang Beijing Institute of Technology, Minghui Zhou Peking University Pre-print Media Attached | ||
12:00 15mTalk | Matching Skills, Past Collaboration, and Limited Competition: Modeling When Open-Source Projects Attract Contributors Research Papers Hongbo Fang Carnegie Mellon University, James Herbsleb Carnegie Mellon University, Bogdan Vasilescu Carnegie Mellon University Media Attached | ||
12:15 15mTalk | Contribution-based Firing of Developers? Ideas, Visions and Reflections Vincenzo Orrei Software Institute - USI, Lugano, Switzerland, Marco Raglianti Software Institute - USI, Lugano, Csaba Nagy Software Institute - USI, Lugano, Michele Lanza Software Institute - USI, Lugano Media Attached |