CHS: SHF: SMALL: Collaborative Research: Scaffolding skill acquisition to onboard OSS ecosystems

Oregon State University, Corvallis OR

Investigators

Abstract

This research aims to develop broadly applicable principles and methods to scaffold the newcomers' skill acquisition as they onboard into an Open Source Software (OSS) project, which in recent years has become an integral part of software development. Although the long-term sustainability of OSS projects depends on the availability of a diverse, passionate group of volunteers, it is quite difficult to become a successful OSS developer. During the onboarding period, newcomers face several barriers such as: steep learning curve, setup misconfiguration, reception problems, and expectation breakdowns. These barriers result in many newcomers giving up, meaning the field may be losing many potential software developers. This research will lead to new insights that can radically improve how newcomers onboard to software projects and to open source communities, which can broaden participation and increase retention. This project's empirical studies and infrastructure design pay particular attention to the fact that differences exist in how people problem-solve and use software features, and that these often cluster by gender. Therefore, broadening participation requires that tools and processes support different problem-solving styles, such that one group is not disproportionately impacted. For this project, skills are defined as the capability of performing an activity; skills can refer to knowledge about the contribution process, programming concepts, or about a class of data, an application programming interface, a library, or the domain. The project objectives are: (1) create a model of skills that pertains to how to be successful in OSS, (2) design and evaluate approaches to extract these skills from open tasks in OSS projects, (3) scaffold skill acquisition of newcomers by matching developers' skills (and their goals) to available tasks in an OSS ecosystem, (4) investigate strategies and design solutions that promote gender inclusiveness, and (5) assess the approach through the design and evaluation of an infrastructure built in this research and made available to the OSS community. The intellectual merit of the work is threefold. First, it will generate a deep understanding of skill models for software development tasks that is anchored and carefully validated in the context of tasks in an OSS ecosystem. Second, the researchers will design approaches that scaffold skill acquisition of developers to create a development trajectory that matches their current skill levels as well as their goals. Finally, a novel infrastructure will be designed and shared, that scaffolds the skill acquisition of newcomers, thereby, mitigating the effects of onboarding barriers. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.