Newcomer Candidate: Characterizing Contributions of a Novice Developer to GitHub
This work addresses the problem of newcomer retention in open-source software projects, which is crucial for project sustainability, but it is incremental as it focuses on preliminary data collection and characterization.
The study introduces the term 'newcomer candidate' to describe new GitHub users and aims to characterize their initial contributions by collecting a dataset of 208 contributions, with plans to analyze their practices and onboarding rates.
Context: To attract, onboard, and retain any new-comer in Open Source Software (OSS) projects is vital to their livelihood. Recent studies conclude that OSS projects risk failure due to abandonment and poor participation of newcomers. Evidence suggests more new users are joining GitHub, however, the extent to which they contribute to OSS projects is unknown. Objective: In this study, we coin the term 'newcomer candidate' to describe new users to the GitHub platform. Our objective is to track and characterize their initial contributions. As a preliminary survey, we collected 208 newcomer candidate contributions in GitHub. Using this dataset, we then plan to track their contributions to reveal insights. Method: We will use a mixed-methods approach, i.e., quantitative and qualitative, to identify whether or not newcomer candidates practice social coding, the kinds of their contributions, projects they target, and the proportion that they eventually onboard to an OSS project. Limitation: The key limitation is that our newcomer candidates are restricted to those that were collected from our preliminary survey.