Almost There: A Study on Quasi-Contributors in Open Source Software Projects

Author(s)

Steinmacher, Igor ; Pinto, Gustavo ; Wiese, Igor Scaliante ; Gerosa, Marco A. ; IEEE

• Document type: Journal article
• Source: PROCEEDINGS 2018 IEEE/ACM 40TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON SOFTWARE ENGINEERING (ICSE); v. N/A, p. 11-pg., 2018-01-01.

Abstract

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 quasi-contributors, and analyzed their pull-requests. In addition, we conducted surveys with quasi-contributors, and project's 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 The main reasons for pull-request nonacceptance from the quasicontributors' perspective were "superseded/duplicated pull-request" and "mismatch between developer's and team's vision/opinion" A manual analysis of a representative sample of 263 pull-requests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. (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 15/24527-3 - Fostering open source software communities on the internet by supporting newcomer software developers
• Grantee: Ivanilton Polato
• Support Opportunities: Regular Research Grants