Choosing an appropriate task to start with in open source software communities: A hard task

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

Open Source Software (OSS) projects leverage the contribution of outsiders. Usually these communities do not coordinate the work of the newcomers, who go to the issue trackers and self-select a task to start with. We found that "finding a way to start" is recurrently reported both by the literature and by practitioners as a barrier to onboard to an OSS project. We conducted a qualitative analysis with data obtained from semi-structured interviews with 36 subjects from 14 different projects. We used procedures of Grounded Theory - open and axial coding - to analyze the data. We found that newcomers are not enough confident to choose their initial task and they need information about the tasks or direction from the community.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationCollaboration and Technology - 20th International Conference, CRIWG 2014, Proceedings
PublisherSpringer-Verlag
Pages349-356
Number of pages8
ISBN (Print)9783319101651
DOIs
StatePublished - 2014
Externally publishedYes
Event20th International Conference on Collaboration and Technology, CRIWG 2014 - Santiago, Chile
Duration: Sep 7 2014Sep 10 2014

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume8658 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference20th International Conference on Collaboration and Technology, CRIWG 2014
Country/TerritoryChile
CitySantiago
Period9/7/149/10/14

Keywords

  • Open Source Software
  • coordination
  • joining process
  • new developer
  • newcomers
  • onboarding
  • task selection

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • General Computer Science

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