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Abstract Mentoring is a well-known way to help newcomers to Open Source Software (OSS) projects overcome initial contribution barriers. Through mentoring, newcomers learn to acquire essential technical, social, and organizational skills. Despite the importance of OSS mentors, they are understudied in the literature. Understanding who OSS project mentors are, the challenges they face, and the strategies they use can help OSS projects better support mentors’ work. In this paper, we employ a two-stage study to comprehensively investigate mentors in OSS. First, we identify the characteristics of mentors in the Apache Software Foundation, a large OSS community, using an online survey. We found that less experienced volunteer contributors are less likely to take on the mentorship role. Second, through interviews with OSS mentors (n=18), we identify the challenges that mentors face and how they mitigate them. In total, we identified 25 general mentorship challenges and 7 sub-categories of challenges regarding task recommendation. We also identified 13 strategies to overcome the challenges related to task recommendation. Our results provide insights for OSS communities, formal mentorship programs, and tool builders who design automated support for task assignment and internship.
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Mentors matter: Association of mentors with project success in the Apache Software Foundation Incubator
Mentoring has been a subject of study for 50 years. Most studies of mentoring programs evaluate the effect of the program on the participants but do not evaluate if different mentors have different effects on mentees. Open-source software (OSS) is software with a license that allows it to be freely used by other people. Such software has become foundational to the world economy. However, many OSS projects get abandoned by their creators. Various nonprofit organizations have arisen to help OSS projects become sustainable. One of the key services offered by many of these nonprofit organizations is a mentorship program where experienced OSS developers advise nascent projects on how to achieve sustainability. We use data from the Apache Software Foundation Incubator program where 303 mentors have mentored 286 projects, with most mentoring more than one project, to address this question: Is who a project has as a mentor associated with variation in project success? Who a project has as a mentor accounts for 45% of the variation in project outcomes, with some mentors being associated with positive and some with negative outcomes. These mentors could offer insights into how to improve the mentoring program. This result also demonstrates, more broadly, that the nature of specific mentoring relationships may be important to understanding how mentors impact outcomes in other mentoring programs.
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- PAR ID:
- 10351339
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- PloS one
- ISSN:
- 1932-6203
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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null (Ed.)Software developers who want to start contributing to an Open Source Software (OSS) project often struggle to find appropriate first tasks. The voluntary, self-organizing distribution of decentralized labor and the distinct nature of some OSS projects intensifies this challenge. Mentors, who work closely with newcomers, develop strategies to recommend tasks. However, to date neither the challenges mentors face in recommending tasks nor their strategies have been formally documented or studied. In this paper, we interviewed mentors of well-established OSS projects (n=10) and qualitatively analyzed their answers to identify both challenges and strategies related to recommending tasks for newcomers. Then, we employed a survey (n=30) to map the strategies to challenges and collect additional strategies. Our study identified 7 challenges and 13 strategies related to task recommendation. Strategies such as “tagging the issues based on difficulty,” “adding documentation,” “assigning a small task first and then challenge the newcomers with bigger tasks,” and “dividing tasks into smaller pieces” were frequently mentioned as ways to overcome multiple challenges. Our results provide insights for mentors about the strategies OSS communities can use to guide their mentors and for tool builders who design automated support for task assignment.more » « less
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0272764
