Portal for novice developers in free software communities

Free software projects have leveraged the development and growth of various sectors of society. Many of these projects are maintained by or receive contributions from globally distributed volunteers. However, when trying to join a project, developers are subject to various barriers related to, for example, breaches of expectation, reception problems, environment configuration, learning curve, etc., and many newcomers end up giving up. Previous studies have investigated the process of becoming a project member and the motivations for contributing, but few have focused on identifying and understanding the critical barriers that newcomers encounter until they submit their first contribution.

In this project, we propose the extension of a previously conducted qualitative study, the design of awareness mechanisms to mitigate these barriers, the implementation of a portal for free software communities and the deployment and evaluation of this portal. Some mechanisms will be based on repository mining techniques to identify dependencies of change between artifacts, analysis of socio-technical networks and identification of signs of software quality problems. With this project we hope to move towards a greater flow of contributions by newcomers to free software communities.

Implementation of entire project can be found here: Code