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Mentoring is one of the most effective pedagogical tools, holding great promise for software engineering education. When done badly, however, it can lead to dysfunctional inter-personal relationships and may turn off mentees from careers in software engineering. In this qualitative interview-based study we examine how socio-technical dimensions of software impact the formation of social ties important for satisfying two goals of mentorship, building technical skill and interpersonal development. We find that mentees working on user facing, interdependent software form a balance of ties that facilitate both goals, while mentees working on non-user facing software mostly form ties important for building technical skill. Work practices that create opportunities for unstructured contact between mentees and community members, such as code review in a mentee cohort, can help to overcome this imbalance. Our findings have important implications for task definition in software engineering e-mentoring program schemes. 

Hackathons are events where people who are not normally collocated converge for a few days to write code together. Hackathons, it seems, are everywhere. We know that long- term collocation helps advance technical work and facilitate enduring interpersonal relationships, but can similar benefits come from brief, hackathon-style collocation? How do participants spend their time preparing, working face-to- face, and following through these brief encounters? Do the activities participants select suggest a tradeoff between the social and technical benefits of collocation? We present results from a multiple-case study that suggest the way that hackathon-style collocation advances technical work varies across technical domain, community structure, and expertise of participants. Building social ties, in contrast, seems relatively constant across hackathons. Results from different hackathon team formation strategies suggest a tradeoff between advancing technical work and building social ties. Our findings have implications for technology support that needs to be in place for hackathons and for understanding the role of brief interludes of collocation in loosely-coupled, geographically distributed work. 

Sharing scientific data, software, and instruments is becoming increasingly common as science moves toward large-scale, distributed collaborations. Sharing these resources requires extra work to make them generally useful. Although we know much about the extra work associated with sharing data, we know little about the work associated with sharing contributions to software, even though software is of vital importance to nearly every scientific result. This paper presents a qualitative, interview-based study of the extra work that developers and end users of scientific software undertake. Our findings indicate that they conduct a rich set of extra work around community management, code maintenance, education and training, developer-user interaction, and foreseeing user needs. We identify several conditions under which they are likely to do this work, as well as design principles that can facilitate it. Our results have important implications for future empirical studies as well as funding policy. 

Community code engagements -- short-term, intensive software development events -- are used by some scientific communities to create new software features and promote community building. But there is as yet little empirical support for their effectiveness. This paper presents a qualitative study of two types of community code engagements: Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and hackathons. We investigated the range of outcomes these engagements produce and the underlying practices that lead to these outcomes. In GSoC, the vision and experience of core members of the community influence project selection, and the intensive mentoring process facilitates creation of strong ties. Most GSoC projects result in stable features. The agenda setting phase of hackathons reveals high priority issues perceived by the community. Social events among the relatively large numbers of participants over brief engagements tend to create weak ties. Most hackathons result in prototypes rather than finished tools. We discuss themes and tradeoffs that suggest directions for future empirical work around designing community code engagements.