What is it about?

Strategies are employed by Open Source Software (OSS) projects and communities to help newcomers onboard and find a task to contribute. In the same way, the contributors use strategies to choose a task. Is there an agreement about those strategies from the perspective of the stakeholders? (project maintainers, frequent contributors, and newcomers) .

Featured Image

Why is it important?

Is there a mismatch between the perspectives of the stakeholders? Resources are limited, and the effort done by maintainers will be lost if there is a gap in expectations among the stakeholders. In addition, as the OSS projects need contributors, this is crucial for the projects and maintainers.

Perspectives

We found differences between strategies' importance (even more between newcomers and maintainers). It should be caused by the diverse goals in contributions for the stakeholders. At the same time, the newcomers must receive attention to succeed in their tasks. Thus, newcomers need a precise contribution process to help them not get lost with the high number of open tasks available. Also, as the projects increase the complexity, setting up the development environment rises in importance. This is a challenge for the projects to keep it simple for the newcomers. Multi-teaming shares some problems with open source software research area. Updated documentation and collaboration tools should be used to aid newcomers in finding a task to start with.

Dr. Fabio Marcos De Abreu Santos
Grand Canyon University

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: How to Choose a Task? Mismatches in Perspectives of Newcomers and Existing Contributors, September 2022, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3544902.3546236.
You can read the full text:

Read

Resources

Contributors

The following have contributed to this page