Who is going to mentor newcomers in open source projects?

  • Authors:

  • Gerardo Canfora;Massimiliano Di Penta;Rocco Oliveto;Sebastiano Panichella

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Sannio, Benevento, Italy;University of Sannio, Benevento, Italy;University of Molise, Pesche (IS), Italy;University of Sannio, Benevento, Italy

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the ACM SIGSOFT 20th International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

When newcomers join a software project, they need to be properly trained to understand the technical and organizational aspects of the project. Inadequate training could likely lead to project delay or failure. In this paper we propose an approach, named Yoda (Young and newcOmer Developer Assistant) aimed at identifying and recommending mentors in software projects by mining data from mailing lists and versioning systems. Candidate mentors are identified among experienced developers who actively interact with newcomers. Then, when a newcomer joins the project, Yoda recommends her a mentor that, among the available ones, has already discussed topics relevant for the newcomer. Yoda has been evaluated on software repositories of five open source projects. We have also surveyed some developers of these projects to understand whether mentoring was actually performed in their projects, and asked them to evaluate the mentoring relations Yoda identified. Results indicate that top committers are not always the most appropriate mentors, and show the potential usefulness of Yoda as a recommendation system to aid project managers in supporting newcomers joining a software project.