Supporting newcomers to overcome the barriers to contribute to open source software projects

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.

A systematic literature review on the barriers faced by newcomers to open source software projects

Downsides of Using Inadequate Open Source Software Processes and Licenses within Standard Development Organizations

The contingent role of interproject connectedness in cultivating open source software projects

\n Software bots integrate their work with humans\\' tasks, serving as conduits between users and other tools. Due to their ability to automate tasks, bots have become particularly relevant for Open Source Software (OSS) projects hosted on GitHub. Commonly, projects use bots to automate various tasks, such as ensuring license agreement signing, reporting continuous integration failures, reviewing code and pull requests, triaging issues, and refactoring the source code. However, in preliminary studies, our findings indicate that the interaction of these bots on pull requests can be disruptive and perceived as unwelcoming by contributors and maintainers. Although bots can be useful for supporting maintainers\\' work, sometimes their comments are seen as spam and are quickly ignored by contributors. In this dissertation, our goal was to identify and understand challenges maintainers and contributors face during interaction with bots on pull requests of OSS projects and design and evaluate a software bot that mitigates some of these problems. Toward this end, we conducted multiple studies using multiple research methods. To identify the challenges caused by bots in pull request interactions, we interviewed 21 practitioners, including project maintainers, contributors, and bot developers. The data was qualitatively analyzed using open and axial coding. Subsequently, the analysis resulted in a theory of how human developers perceive annoying bot behaviors as noise on social coding platforms. Based on this theory, we conducted a participatory design fiction study with 32 practitioners and researchers. This study resulted in design strategies that served as insights to create a prototype. We conducted a suitability study with 15 design fiction participants to assess the envisioned solution. By collecting participants perceptions about a prototype implementing the envisioned strategies, we identified improvements to the prototype according to the suggestions received from the study participants. The main contributions of this dissertation are: (i) identifying the changes in project activity indicators after the adoption of a bot; (ii) proposing a theory about how noise introduced by bots disrupts developers\\' communication and workflow; (iii) identifying strategies to mitigate the information overload generated by the existing bots\\' interaction; and (iv) the concept of a meta-bot to support contribution to OSS projects. These contributions may help practitioners understand the effects of adopting a bot. Researchers and tool designers may leverage our results to better support human-bot interaction on social coding platforms.\n

One of the recurrent themes in open source software research is to understand the impacts of various project characteristics on its success. Open source software (OSS) projects rely on voluntary participation of developers and tend to be continually in development. Hence, an important measure of success is the time it takes for an OSS project to release a stable version to its users. However, there is little research on this success measure and how the OSS characteristics enable or delay the progress towards stable release. In this study, we use survival analysis technique on open source project data to explore the impacts of OSS characteristics on the time it takes to release stable software versions. We find that when compared to the interest of developers in the project, interest of end-users has a greater positive effect on an OSS project progress towards stable release. Our findings also suggest that the use of C and C-like programming languages or a Weak-Copyleft license for the open source project negatively impact the project’s time to reach stable status. In OSS projects less than 8 months since becoming public, the use of a Strong-Copyleft license positively affects the project’s progress. One of the implications of our findings is that OSS project administrators should control software change requests or form smaller developer groups to better control the delays due to higher developer interest in their projects.

An Open Source Software (OSS) project can be considered as a new type of business entity involving various roles and stakeholders, e.g., project managers, developers, and users, who apply individual methods. The project managers have the responsibility to manage the OSS development in a way that the OSS product can be delivered to the customers in time and with good quality. This responsibility is challenging, because the heterogeneity of the data collected and analyzed from different stakeholders leads to the complexity of efforts of the project managers to measure and manage OSS projects. In this paper, we propose a measurement framework (OSMF) to enable the project managers to collect and analyze process data from OSS projects efficiently. Initial results show that OSMF can help project managers to manage OSS business processes more efficient, hence improve the decision on OSS project quality.

<p>The purpose of this research was to identify factors that affect participants’ satisfaction with their experience of a free/libre open source software (FLOSS) project. The research built on existing models of user satisfaction from the information systems literature, and also incorporated two characteristics of FLOSS projects first identified by Ye, Nakakoji, Yamamoto, and Kishida (2005), product openness and process openness. The central research question it answered was, What factors influence participant satisfaction with a free/libre and open source application software project? Richard Stallman’s reasons for setting up the GNU project and the Free Software Foundation arose from his frustration at being forced to be a passive user of software used for a Xerox printer. These suggest that being able to be an active participant in a FLOSS project is one factor that should be examined, and therefore the first sub-question this project answers is, What types of contributions do participants make to free/libre and open source software projects? Several studies have shown that the extent of participation in a FLOSS project varies from individual to individual, and this variation leads to the second sub-question, Do the factors that influence satisfaction vary for different types of participation? If so, in what way? A preliminary conceptual model of factors affecting participant satisfaction was developed, reflecting the key concepts identified in the literature. The main theoretical goal of this research was to test the model using empirical data. The research used a sequential, mixed methods approach. The first, qualitative stage involved reviewing documents from selected projects and interviewing a purposive sample of FLOSS project participants. The second, quantitative stage involved an online survey of FLOSS project participants, and the data gathered were used to test the conceptual model. The results of the first stage showed that participation in FLOSS projects was a more complex construct than previously reported in the literature. Seven distinct categories of activities were identified: • use; • interaction with code; • supporting the community; • outreach; • sponsorship; • management; and • governance. Four attributes that modified these categories were also identified: organisational focus, role formality, remuneration, and time commitment. Data from 154 responses to the online survey were used to test the model using stepwise multiple regression, which determined the effect of each of the variables on overall participant satisfaction. Moderated regression analysis was used to test the effects of three potential moderating variables. The results showed that that perceived system complexity had the largest effect, decreasing satisfaction if respondents perceived that the software was complex, while project openness and perceived developer communication quality accounted for the most variance in satisfaction. The main theoretical contribution of this research lies in its extension of satisfaction studies to FLOSS communities, showing that communication and openness are more important than in conventional software projects. Its practical contribution will help people involved in the management and governance of FLOSS projects to identify ways of increasing their participants’ satisfaction, which may in turn encourage them to contribute more.</p>

<p>The purpose of this research was to identify factors that affect participants’ satisfaction with their experience of a free/libre open source software (FLOSS) project. The research built on existing models of user satisfaction from the information systems literature, and also incorporated two characteristics of FLOSS projects first identified by Ye, Nakakoji, Yamamoto, and Kishida (2005), product openness and process openness. The central research question it answered was, What factors influence participant satisfaction with a free/libre and open source application software project? Richard Stallman’s reasons for setting up the GNU project and the Free Software Foundation arose from his frustration at being forced to be a passive user of software used for a Xerox printer. These suggest that being able to be an active participant in a FLOSS project is one factor that should be examined, and therefore the first sub-question this project answers is, What types of contributions do participants make to free/libre and open source software projects? Several studies have shown that the extent of participation in a FLOSS project varies from individual to individual, and this variation leads to the second sub-question, Do the factors that influence satisfaction vary for different types of participation? If so, in what way? A preliminary conceptual model of factors affecting participant satisfaction was developed, reflecting the key concepts identified in the literature. The main theoretical goal of this research was to test the model using empirical data. The research used a sequential, mixed methods approach. The first, qualitative stage involved reviewing documents from selected projects and interviewing a purposive sample of FLOSS project participants. The second, quantitative stage involved an online survey of FLOSS project participants, and the data gathered were used to test the conceptual model. The results of the first stage showed that participation in FLOSS projects was a more complex construct than previously reported in the literature. Seven distinct categories of activities were identified: • use; • interaction with code; • supporting the community; • outreach; • sponsorship; • management; and • governance. Four attributes that modified these categories were also identified: organisational focus, role formality, remuneration, and time commitment. Data from 154 responses to the online survey were used to test the model using stepwise multiple regression, which determined the effect of each of the variables on overall participant satisfaction. Moderated regression analysis was used to test the effects of three potential moderating variables. The results showed that that perceived system complexity had the largest effect, decreasing satisfaction if respondents perceived that the software was complex, while project openness and perceived developer communication quality accounted for the most variance in satisfaction. The main theoretical contribution of this research lies in its extension of satisfaction studies to FLOSS communities, showing that communication and openness are more important than in conventional software projects. Its practical contribution will help people involved in the management and governance of FLOSS projects to identify ways of increasing their participants’ satisfaction, which may in turn encourage them to contribute more.</p>

The majority of contributions to community open source software (OSS) projects are made by practitioners acting on behalf of companies and other organisations. Previous research has addressed the motivations of both individuals and companies to engage with OSS projects. However, limited research has been undertaken that examines and explains the practical mechanisms or work practices used by companies and their developers to pursue their commercial and technical objectives when engaging with OSS projects. This research investigates the variety of work practices used in public communication channels by company contributors to engage with and contribute to eight community OSS projects. Through interviews with contributors to the eight projects we draw on their experiences and insights to explore the motivations to use particular methods of contribution. We find that companies utilise work practices for contributing to community projects which are congruent with the circumstances and their capabilities that support their short- and long-term needs. We also find that companies contribute to community OSS projects in ways that may not always be apparent from public sources, such as employing core project developers, making donations, and joining project steering committees in order to advance strategic interests. The factors influencing contributor work practices can be complex and are often dynamic arising from considerations such as company and project structure, as well as technical concerns and commercial strategies. The business context in which software created by the OSS project is deployed is also found to influence contributor work practices.

Developers reuse programming-related knowledge (e.g., code snippets) on Q&A sites (e.g., Stack Overflow) that functionally matches the programming problems they encounter in their development. Despite extensive research on Q&A sites, being a high-level and important type of development-related knowledge, architectural solutions (e.g., architecture tactics) and their reuse are rarely explored. To fill this gap, we conducted a mixed-methods study that includes a mining study and a survey study. For the mining study, we mined 984 commits and issues (i.e., 821 commits and 163 issues) from 893 Open-Source Software (OSS) projects on GitHub that explicitly referenced architectural solutions from Stack Overflow (SO) and Software Engineering Stack Exchange (SWESE). For the survey study, we identified practitioners involved in the reuse of these architectural solutions and surveyed 227 of them to further understand how practitioners reuse architectural solutions from Q&A sites in their OSS development. Our main findings are that: (1) OSS practitioners reuse architectural solutions from Q&A sites to solve a large variety (15 categories) of architectural problems, wherein <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Component design issue</i>, <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Architectural anti-pattern</i>, and <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Security issue</i> are dominant; (2) Seven categories of architectural solutions from Q&A sites have been reused to solve those problems, among which <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Architectural refactoring</i>, <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Use of frameworks</i>, and <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Architectural tactic</i> are the three most reused architectural solutions; (3) OSS developers often rely on ad hoc ways (e.g., informal, improvised, or unstructured approaches) to reuse architectural solutions from SO, drawing on personal experience and intuition rather than standardized or systematic practices; (4) Reusing architectural solutions from SO comes with a variety of challenges, e.g., OSS practitioners complain that they need to spend significant time to adapt such architectural solutions to address design concerns raised in their OSS development, and it is challenging to reuse architectural solutions that are not tailored to the design context of their OSS projects. Our findings pave the way for future research directions, including the design and development of approaches and tools (such as IDE plugin tools) to facilitate the reuse of architectural solutions from Q&A sites, and could also be used to offer guidelines to practitioners when they contribute architectural solutions to Q&A sites. Our dataset is publicly available at <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10936098</uri>.

Open Source Software (OSS) projects start with an initial vocabulary, often determined by the first generation of developers. This vocabulary, embedded in code identifier names and internal code comments, goes through multiple rounds of change, influenced by the interrelated patterns of human (e.g., developers joining and departing) and system (e.g., maintenance activities) interactions. Capturing the dynamics of this change is crucial for understanding and synthesizing code changes over time. However, existing code evolution analysis tools, available in modern version control systems such as GitHub and SourceForge, often overlook the linguistic aspects of code evolution. To bridge this gap, in this paper, we propose to study code evolution in OSS projects through the lens of developers' language, also known as code lexicon. Our analysis is conducted using 32 OSS projects sampled from a broad range of application domains. Our results show that different maintenance activities impact code lexicon differently. These insights lay out a preliminary foundation for modeling the linguistic history of OSS projects. In the long run, this foundation will be utilized to provide support for basic program comprehension tasks and help researchers gain new insights into the complex interplay between linguistic change and various system and human aspects of OSS development.

But what will it cost me? How do private costs of participation affect open source software projects?

Open-source software (OSS) projects are relatively unexplored territory in music education research and practice. In contrast to commercial software development, OSS projects are informally organized and free in terms of administration and control. Developers contribute in several ways according to their own will and whenever they want. In music education, the possible OSS project stakeholders can vary from independent developers to researchers, schools and commercial companies. The structure of this multifaceted collaboration scheme can be very diverse and complex. This article will present a case from a sponsored music educational open-source project that developed a mobile phone-based music software for children. The characteristics of collaboration, project structure, roles of different stakeholders and open-source licensing from this project will shed light on different aspects and characteristics of OSS development in music education. As a conclusion, an iterative process model for OSS projects in music education will be drawn.

Complex software development projects rely on the contribution of teams of developers, who are required to collaborate and coordinate their efforts. The productivity of such development teams, i.e., how their size is related to the produced output, is an important consideration for project and schedule management as well as for cost estimation. The majority of studies in empirical software engineering suggest that - due to coordination overhead - teams of collaborating developers become less productive as they grow in size. This phenomenon is commonly paraphrased as Brooks' law of software project management, which states that "adding manpower to a software project makes it later". Outside software engineering, the non-additive scaling of productivity in teams is often referred to as the Ringelmann effect, which is studied extensively in social psychology and organizational theory. Conversely, a recent study suggested that in Open Source Software (OSS) projects, the productivity of developers increases as the team grows in size. Attributing it to collective synergetic effects, this surprising finding was linked to the Aristotelian quote that "the whole is more than the sum of its parts". Using a data set of 58 OSS projects with more than 580,000 commits contributed by more than 30,000 developers, in this article we provide a large-scale analysis of the relation between size and productivity of software development teams. Our findings confirm the negative relation between team size and productivity previously suggested by empirical software engineering research, thus providing quantitative evidence for the presence of a strong Ringelmann effect. Using fine-grained data on the association between developers and source code files, we investigate possible explanations for the observed relations between team size and productivity. In particular, we take a network perspective on developer-code associations in software development teams and show that the magnitude of the decrease in productivity is likely to be related to the growth dynamics of co-editing networks which can be interpreted as a first-order approximation of coordination requirements.