TY - JOUR
T1 - Almost There
T2 - 40th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2018
AU - Steinmacher, Igor
AU - Pinto, Gustavo
AU - Wiese, Igor Scaliante
AU - Gerosa, Marco A.
N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2018 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).
PY - 2018
Y1 - 2018
N2 - Recent studies suggest that well-known OSS projects struggle to find the needed workforce to continue evolving-in part because external developers fail to overcome their first contribution barriers. In this paper, we investigate how and why quasi-contributors (external developers who did not succeed in getting their contributions accepted to an OSS project) fail. To achieve our goal, we collected data from 21 popular, non-trivial GitHub projects, identified quasicontributors, and analyzed their pull-requests. In addition, we conducted surveys with quasi-contributors, and projects' integrators, to understand their perceptions about nonacceptance. We found 10,099 quasi-contributors-about 70% of the total actual contributors-that submitted 12,367 nonaccepted pull-requests. In five projects, we found more quasi-contributors than actual contributors. About one-third of the developers who took our survey disagreed with the nonacceptance, and around 30% declared the nonacceptance demotivated or prevented them from placing another pull-request. The main reasons for pull-request nonacceptance from the quasicontributors' perspective were "superseded/duplicated pull-request"and "mismatch between developer's and team's vision/opinion."A manual analysis of a representative sample of 263 pull-requests corroborated with this finding. We also found reasons related to the relationship with the community and lack of experience or commitment from the quasi-contributors. This empirical study is particularly relevant to those interested in fostering developers' participation and retention in OSS communities.
AB - Recent studies suggest that well-known OSS projects struggle to find the needed workforce to continue evolving-in part because external developers fail to overcome their first contribution barriers. In this paper, we investigate how and why quasi-contributors (external developers who did not succeed in getting their contributions accepted to an OSS project) fail. To achieve our goal, we collected data from 21 popular, non-trivial GitHub projects, identified quasicontributors, and analyzed their pull-requests. In addition, we conducted surveys with quasi-contributors, and projects' integrators, to understand their perceptions about nonacceptance. We found 10,099 quasi-contributors-about 70% of the total actual contributors-that submitted 12,367 nonaccepted pull-requests. In five projects, we found more quasi-contributors than actual contributors. About one-third of the developers who took our survey disagreed with the nonacceptance, and around 30% declared the nonacceptance demotivated or prevented them from placing another pull-request. The main reasons for pull-request nonacceptance from the quasicontributors' perspective were "superseded/duplicated pull-request"and "mismatch between developer's and team's vision/opinion."A manual analysis of a representative sample of 263 pull-requests corroborated with this finding. We also found reasons related to the relationship with the community and lack of experience or commitment from the quasi-contributors. This empirical study is particularly relevant to those interested in fostering developers' participation and retention in OSS communities.
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U2 - 10.1145/3180155.3180208
DO - 10.1145/3180155.3180208
M3 - Conference article
SN - 0270-5257
VL - 2018-January
SP - 256
EP - 266
JO - Proceedings - International Conference on Software Engineering
JF - Proceedings - International Conference on Software Engineering
Y2 - 27 May 2018 through 3 June 2018
ER -