TY - GEN
T1 - Assessing the Characteristics of FOSS Contributions in Network Automation Projects
AU - Anderson, John
AU - Steinmacher, Igor
AU - Rodeghero, Paige
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 IEEE.
PY - 2020/9
Y1 - 2020/9
N2 - Network Automation seeks to integrate software solutions that aid in the management and maintenance of modern networks. In industry, large organizations see dedicated software engineering resources within a networking team. However, in the broader industry, it is more common to see traditional network engineers working on network automation. With the growth of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), network automation software solutions also started to adhere to this development model. However, as it is known from the literature, onboarding to FOSS projects is not a trivial task and may be more challenging for people without a software development background. In this paper, we study network automation FOSS projects, which are seeing a large number of new contributors who do not have traditional software engineering skills. We analyze a set of data collected from pull requests and issues collected from 81 GitHub projects (71 network automation projects, and 10 top-projects from other domains), to identify the characteristics that are specific to first-time project contributors in the network automation domain. Our results show that pull requests in the Network Automation domain differ from those in the Top-10 set and the existing literature. At the same time that Network Automation projects are more inclusive (rejection rate: 12% vs. 28% on Top-10), the pull request latency is longer in this specific domain, especially for first-timers.
AB - Network Automation seeks to integrate software solutions that aid in the management and maintenance of modern networks. In industry, large organizations see dedicated software engineering resources within a networking team. However, in the broader industry, it is more common to see traditional network engineers working on network automation. With the growth of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), network automation software solutions also started to adhere to this development model. However, as it is known from the literature, onboarding to FOSS projects is not a trivial task and may be more challenging for people without a software development background. In this paper, we study network automation FOSS projects, which are seeing a large number of new contributors who do not have traditional software engineering skills. We analyze a set of data collected from pull requests and issues collected from 81 GitHub projects (71 network automation projects, and 10 top-projects from other domains), to identify the characteristics that are specific to first-time project contributors in the network automation domain. Our results show that pull requests in the Network Automation domain differ from those in the Top-10 set and the existing literature. At the same time that Network Automation projects are more inclusive (rejection rate: 12% vs. 28% on Top-10), the pull request latency is longer in this specific domain, especially for first-timers.
KW - Open Source
KW - networking automation
KW - onboarding
KW - software engineering
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85096705193&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85096705193&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/ICSME46990.2020.00039
DO - 10.1109/ICSME46990.2020.00039
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85096705193
T3 - Proceedings - 2020 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, ICSME 2020
SP - 324
EP - 335
BT - Proceedings - 2020 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, ICSME 2020
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - 36th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, ICSME 2020
Y2 - 27 September 2020 through 3 October 2020
ER -