The First Issue Matters: Linking Task-Level Characteristics to Long-Term Newcomer Retention in OSS
For open-source maintainers, this study provides actionable insights on designing issue management to improve newcomer retention, addressing a gap in prior work that overlooked the link between first-issue characteristics and sustained participation.
This paper investigates how the characteristics of a newcomer's first issue in open-source software projects affect their long-term retention. Using predictive analysis and causal inference, they find that interaction-related features (e.g., discussion intensity, participant experience) are more influential than intrinsic issue attributes, with moderate discussion and neutral sentiment leading to higher retention.
Sustaining newcomer participation is critical for the long-term health of open-source communities. Although prior research has explored various task recommendation approaches to help newcomers resolve their first-issue, these methods overlook how characteristics of first-issues may influence newcomers' long-term retention, limiting our understanding of whether initial success leads to sustained participation and hindering effective onboarding design. In this paper, we conduct a large-scale empirical study to examine how first-issue characteristics affect newcomer retention. We combine predictive analysis, interpretability techniques, and causal inference to estimate the causal effects of issue characteristics on retention outcomes. The prediction task supports the interpretation and shows that interaction-related characteristics exhibit stronger associations with retention than intrinsic issue attributes. The causal analysis further reveals that issues reported by moderately experienced contributors, accompanied by moderate discussion intensity and participation from project members, and neutral or slightly negative comment sentiment, have higher retention potential. These findings provide actionable insights for OSS maintainers on designing issue management practices that better support long-term newcomer retention.