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.
How to Choose a Task? Mismatches in Perspectives of Newcomers and Existing Contributors
[Background]
Selecting an appropriate task is challenging for Open Source Software (OSS) project newcomers and a variety of strategies can help them in this process.
[Aims]
In this research, we compare the perspective of maintainers, newcomers, and existing contributors about the importance of strategies to support this process. Our goal is to identify possible gulfs of expectations between newcomers who are meant to be helped and contributors who have to put effort into these strategies, which can create friction and impede the usefulness of the strategies.
[Method]
We interviewed maintainers (n=17) and applied inductive qualitative analysis to derive a model of strategies meant to be adopted by newcomers and communities. Next, we sent a questionnaire (n=64) to maintainers, frequent contributors, and newcomers, asking them to rank these strategies based on their importance. We used the Schulze method to compare the different rankings from the different types of contributors.
[Results]
Maintainers and contributors diverged in their opinions about the relative importance of various strategies. The results suggest that newcomers want a better contribution process and more support to onboard, while maintainers expect to solve questions using the available communication channels.
[Conclusions]
The gaps in perspectives between newcomers and existing contributors create a gulf of expectation. OSS communities can leverage our results to prioritize the strategies considered the most important by newcomers.
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- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10356941
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM 2022)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 114 to 124
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Abstract -
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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Open Source Software (OSS) Foundations and projects are investing in creating Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) initiatives. However, little is known about contributors‘ perceptions about the usefulness and success of such initiatives. We aim to close this gap by investigating how contributors perceive the state of D&I in their community. In collaboration with the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), we surveyed 600+ OSS contributors and conducted 11 follow-up interviews. We used mixed methods to analyze our data-quantitative analysis of Likert-scale questions and qualitative analysis of open-ended survey question and the interviews to understand contributors‘ perceptions and critiques of the D&I initiative and how to improve it. Our results indicate that the ASF contributors felt that the state of D&I was still lacking, especially regarding gender, seniority, and English proficiency. Regarding the D&I initiative, some participants felt that the effort was unnecessary, while others agreed with the effort but critiqued its implementation. These findings show that D&I initiatives in OSS communities are a good start, but there is room for improvements. Our results can inspire the creation of new and the refinement of current initiatives. Open Source Software (OSS) is widely used in society (e.g., Linux, Chrome, and Firefox), and contributing to these projects helps individuals learn and showcase their skills, so much so that the history of contributions are increasingly being analyzed by hirers. However, the people who contribute to OSS are predominately men (about 90%). This means that women and other minorities lose out on job opportunities and OSS projects lose out on diversity of thought. OSS organizations such as the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) promote a variety of initiatives to increase diversity and inclusion (D&I) in their projects, but they are piecemeal and little is known about contributors‘ perceptions about the usefulness and success of these initiatives. Here, we surveyed and interviewed ASF contributors to understand their perceptions about the state of D&I in the ASF and the effectiveness of existing D&I initiatives. Our findings show that individuals who are in the minority face challenges (e.g., stereotyping, lack of peer-network, and representation in decision making) and contributors‘ perceptions of the D&I initiative are a mixed bag, ranging from commending the current efforts to considering them to be “lip service”. These findings suggest that current D&I initiatives in OSS communities are a good start, but much needs be done in terms of creating new successful initiatives and refining current ones.more » « less
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3544902.3546236
