Choosing an appropriate task to start with in open source software communities: A hard task

Abstract

Open Source Software (OSS) projects leverage the contribution of outsiders. Usually these communities do not coordinate the work of the newcomers, who go to the issue trackers and self-select a task to start with. We found that "finding a way to start" is recurrently reported both by the literature and by practitioners as a barrier to onboard to an OSS project. We conducted a qualitative analysis with data obtained from semi-structured interviews with 36 subjects from 14 different projects. We used procedures of Grounded Theory - open and axial coding - to analyze the data. We found that newcomers are not enough confident to choose their initial task and they need information about the tasks or direction from the community. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.