Igor Steinmacher

The hard life of open source software project newcomers

While onboarding an open source software (OSS) project, contributors face many different barriers that hinder their contribution, leading in many cases to dropouts. Many projects leverage the contribution of outsiders and the sustainability of the project relies on retaining some of these newcomers. In this paper, we discuss some barriers faced by newcomers to OSS. The barriers were identified using a qualitative analysis on data obtained from newcomers and members of OSS projects. We organize the results in a conceptual model composed of 38 barriers, grouped into seven different categories. These barriers may motivate new studies and the development of appropriate tooling to better support the onboarding of new contributors.

Overcoming open source project entry barriers with a portal for newcomers

Community-based Open Source Software (OSS) projects are usually self-organized and dynamic, receiving contributions from distributed volunteers. Newcomer are important to the survival, long-term success, and continuity of these communities. However, newcomers face many barriers when making their first contribution to an OSS project, leading in many cases to dropouts. Therefore, a major challenge for OSS projects is to provide ways to support newcomers during their first contribution. In this paper, we propose and evaluate FLOSScoach, a portal created to support newcomers to OSS projects. FLOSScoach was designed based on a conceptual model of barriers created in our previous work. To evaluate the portal, we conducted a study with 65 students, relying on qualitative data from diaries, self-efficacy questionnaires, and the Technology Acceptance Model. The results indicate that FLOSScoach played an important role in guiding newcomers and in lowering barriers related to the orientation and contribution process, whereas it was not effective in lowering technical barriers. We also found that FLOSScoach is useful, easy to use, and increased newcomers’ confidence to contribute. Our results can help project maintainers on deciding the points that need more attention in order to help OSS project newcomers overcome entry barriers.

Recommending mentors to software project newcomers

Open Source Software projects success depends on the continuous influx of newcomers and their contributions. Newcomers play an important role as they are the potential future developers, but they face difficulties and obstacles when initiating their interaction with a project, resulting in a high amount of withdrawals. This paper presents a recommendation system aiming to support newcomers finding the most appropriate project member to mentor them in a technical task. The proposed system uses temporal and social aspects of developers behavior, in addition to recent contextual information to recommend the most suitable mentor at the moment.

Barriers Faced by Newcomers to Open Source Projects: A Systematic Review

To remain sustainable, some open source projects need a constant influx of new volunteers, or newcomers. However, the newcomers face different kinds of problems when onboarding to a project. In this paper we present the results of a systematic literature review aiming at identifying the barriers that a newcomer can face when contributing to an Open Source Software project. We identified and analyzed 21 studies that evidence this kind of problem. As a result we provide a hierarchical model that relies on five categories of barriers: finding a way to start, social interactions, code issues, documentation problems and newcomers’ knowledge. The most evidenced barriers are newcomers’ previous technical skills, receiving response from community, centrality of social contacts, and finding the appropriate way to start contributing. This classification provides a baseline for further researches related to newcomers onboarding.

Social metrics included in prediction models on software engineering: a mapping study

Context: Previous work that used prediction models on Software Engineering included few social metrics as predictors, even though many researchers argue that Software Engineering is a social activity. Even when social metrics were considered, they were classified as part of other dimensions, such as process, history, or change. Moreover, few papers report the individual effects of social metrics. Thus, it is not clear yet which social metrics are used in prediction models and what are the results of their use in different contexts. Objective: To identify, characterize, and classify social metrics included in prediction models reported in the literature. Method: We conducted a mapping study (MS) using a snowballing citation analysis. We built an initial seed list adapting strings of two previous systematic reviews on software prediction models. After that, we conducted backward and forward citation analysis using the initial seed list. Finally, we visited the profile of each distinct author identified in the previous steps and contacted each author that published more than 2 papers to ask for additional candidate studies. Results: We identified 48 primary studies and 51 social metrics. We organized the metrics into nine categories, which were divided into three groups - communication, project, and commit-related. We also mapped the applications of each group of metrics, indicating their positive or negative effects. Conclusions: This mapping may support researchers and practitioners to build their prediction models considering more social metrics.

Barriers Faced by Newcomers to Software-Crowdsourcing Projects

Crowdsourcing distributes a task to a large network of people--the crowd--through an open call. Newcomers (those attempting to make their first successful contribution) are especially important because they are a source of new ideas and promote a sustainable number of developers. So, newcomers should be encouraged to be active participants in software crowdsourcing. However, newcomers can have difficulty winning algorithm competitions. In addition, six types of barriers can hinder them: lack of documentation, poor task management, problems understanding code structure or architecture, information overload, poor platform usability, and the language barrier. Fortunately, ways exist to minimize the barriers, including consistent documentation, well-structured source code, recommending tasks that are appropriate for newcomers, and assigning tasks to newcomers that let them derive more benefits for themselves. This article is part of a special issue on Crowdsourcing for Software Engineering.

Training the future workforce through task curation in an OSS ecosystem

Volunteers to Open Source Software (OSS) projects contribute not only to help creating software that they use, but also to gain skills and enrich their expertise and resumes. However, newcomers to OSS face several challenges when joining a project. Particularly, they do not know where to start, or choose tasks that they can be successful at. Here, we describe our vision towards BugExchange, a system that curates tasks from OSS projects and helps train newcomers. While evaluating and executing these tasks, newcomers can gain an understanding about the project, its technology, and concepts. There are many challenges in designing such a system. For example, identifying the information needs of newcomers, creating task recommendations that match newcomers’ skills and career goals, and providing mentoring and networking support. We plan to leverage our previous work to conceive and prototype our system, which will include multiple research lines. BugExchange has the potential to improve newcomer learning experiences, reduce dropouts, and foster community building.

Checklist-based Inspection of SMarty Variability Models

Software inspection is a particular type of software review applied to all life-cycle artifacts and follows a rigorous and well-defined defect detection process. Existing literature defines several inspection techniques for different domains. However, they are not for inspecting product-line UML variability models. This paper proposes SMartyCheck, a checklist-based software inspection technique for product-line use case and class variability models according to the SMarty approach. In addition, it presents and discusses the empirical feasibility of SMartyCheck based on the feedback from several experts. It provides evidence of the SMartyCheck feasibility, as well as to improve it, forming a body of knowledge for planning prospective empirical studies and automation of SMartyCheck.

What can commit metadata tell us about design degradation

Design degradation has long been assessed by means of structural analyses applied on successive versions of a software system. More recently, repository mining techniques have been developed in order to uncover rich historical information of software projects. In this paper, we leverage such information and propose an approach to assess design degradation that is programming language agnostic and relies almost exclusively on commit metadata. Our approach currently focuses on the assessment of two particular design smells: rigidity and fragility. Rigidity refer to designs that are difficult to change due to ripple effects and fragility refer to designs that tend to break in different areas every time a change is performed. We conducted an evaluation of our approach in the project Apache Maven 1 and the results indicated that our approach is feasible and that the project suffered from increasing fragility.

How modern news aggregators help development communities shape and share knowledge

Many developers rely on modern news aggregator sites such as reddit and hn to stay up to date with the latest technological developments and trends. In order to understand what motivates developers to contribute, what kind of content is shared, and how knowledge is shaped by the community, we interviewed and surveyed developers that participate on the reddit programming subreddit and we analyzed a sample of posts on both reddit and hn. We learned what kind of content is shared in these websites and developer motivations for posting, sharing, discussing, evaluating, and aggregating knowledge on these aggregators, while revealing challenges developers face in terms of how content and participant behavior is moderated. Our insights aim to improve the practices developers follow when using news aggregators, as well as guide tool makers on how to improve their tools. Our findings are also relevant to researchers that study developer communities of practice.