Abstract
Mentoring is a well-known way to help newcomers to Open Source Software (OSS) projects overcome initial contribution barriers. Through mentoring, newcomers learn to acquire essential technical, social, and organizational skills. Despite the importance of OSS mentors, they are understudied in the literature. Understanding who OSS project mentors are, the challenges they face, and the strategies they use can help OSS projects better support mentors’ work. In this paper, we employ a two-stage study to comprehensively investigate mentors in OSS. First, we identify the characteristics of mentors in the Apache Software Foundation, a large OSS community, using an online survey. We found that less experienced volunteer contributors are less likely to take on the mentorship role. Second, through interviews with OSS mentors (n=18), we identify the challenges that mentors face and how they mitigate them. In total, we identified 25 general mentorship challenges and 7 sub-categories of challenges regarding task recommendation. We also identified 13 strategies to overcome the challenges related to task recommendation. Our results provide insights for OSS communities, formal mentorship programs, and tool builders who design automated support for task assignment and internship.
Highlights
Mentorship is frequently adopted in Open Source Software (OSS) projects as a strategy to help newcomers overcome the barriers they face in their first steps toward contribution [1,2,3,4,5]
4 Results Our study reveals characteristics of mentors (RQ1), challenges they face in mentorship activities (RQ2), and specific challenges and strategies for recommending tasks for newcomers (RQ3)
A large majority were men (92.7%), experienced in the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), had some component of their work paid (62.9% when combining those fully and partially paid), and reported good English proficiency for both technical and social interactions
Summary
Mentorship is frequently adopted in Open Source Software (OSS) projects as a strategy to help newcomers overcome the barriers they face in their first steps toward contribution [1,2,3,4,5]. Mentors are usually peers who succeeded in overcoming the project challenges themselves and are willing to help others onboard [11]. In this context, a mentor is a peer who was assigned to or who volunteered to support newcomers onboarding to a project. Mentoring relationships are commonly employed in communities of practice, in which mentors provide mentees with support in developing the skills and competencies necessary for full and productive participation in the community. In fan fiction communities, informal peer mentors help authors improve their writing skills by providing feedback and answering questions [24]. Besides helping in technical activities, mentors can encourage developers to improve their communication and collaboration skills [28]
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