TY - GEN
T1 - Hits and Misses
T2 - 29th IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering, SANER 2022
AU - Santos, Italo
AU - Wiese, Igor
AU - Steinmacher, Igor
AU - Sarma, Anita
AU - Gerosa, Marco A.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 IEEE.
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - Participation in Open Source Software (OSS) projects offers real software development experience for students and other newcomers seeking to develop their skills. However, onboarding to an OSS project brings various challenges, including finding a suitable task among various open issues. Selecting an appropriate starter task requires newcomers to identify the skills needed to solve a project issue and avoiding tasks too far from their skill set. However, little is known about how effective newcomers are in identifying the skills needed to resolve an issue. We asked 154 undergrad students to evaluate issues from OSS projects and infer the skills needed to contribute. Students reported a total of 94 skills, which we classified into 10 categories. We compared the students' answers to those collected from 6 professional developers. In general, students misidentified and missed several skills (f-measure=0.37). Students had results closer to professional developers for skills related to database, operating infrastructure, programming concepts, and programming language, and they had worse results in identifying skills related to debugging and program comprehension. Our results can help educators who seek to use OSS as part of their courses and OSS communities that want to label newcomer-friendly issues to facilitate onboarding of new contributors.
AB - Participation in Open Source Software (OSS) projects offers real software development experience for students and other newcomers seeking to develop their skills. However, onboarding to an OSS project brings various challenges, including finding a suitable task among various open issues. Selecting an appropriate starter task requires newcomers to identify the skills needed to solve a project issue and avoiding tasks too far from their skill set. However, little is known about how effective newcomers are in identifying the skills needed to resolve an issue. We asked 154 undergrad students to evaluate issues from OSS projects and infer the skills needed to contribute. Students reported a total of 94 skills, which we classified into 10 categories. We compared the students' answers to those collected from 6 professional developers. In general, students misidentified and missed several skills (f-measure=0.37). Students had results closer to professional developers for skills related to database, operating infrastructure, programming concepts, and programming language, and they had worse results in identifying skills related to debugging and program comprehension. Our results can help educators who seek to use OSS as part of their courses and OSS communities that want to label newcomer-friendly issues to facilitate onboarding of new contributors.
KW - Ex-pertise
KW - Newcomers
KW - Open-source software
KW - Skills
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85135824526&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85135824526&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/SANER53432.2022.00032
DO - 10.1109/SANER53432.2022.00032
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85135824526
T3 - Proceedings - 2022 IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering, SANER 2022
SP - 174
EP - 183
BT - Proceedings - 2022 IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering, SANER 2022
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Y2 - 15 March 2022 through 18 March 2022
ER -