一句话：对964个仓库的48,402个GFI进行混合方法分析，揭示导师参与的结构、主题及其对新人贡献与留存的作用。
为新人在开源项目中推荐 Good First Issues（GFI）已是常见 onboarding 手段，但仅推荐任务是否足够、导师指导有多重要仍不清楚。本文对 964 个仓库的 48,402 个 GFI 解决过程进行混合方法分析，考察专家参与程度、导师结构、讨论主题及专家参与的相关性。结果发现约 70% 的 GFI 有专家参与，通常一位专家发表两条评论；半数 GFI 在新人评论后 8.5 小时内获得首条专家评论。协作网络显示集中式、去中心式、协作式和分布式四类导师结构；主题分析识别出 14 类新人挑战与 18 类专家指导内容。广义线性模型表明，专家参与与新人成功贡献正相关，但与留存负相关。
Newcomers are critical for the success and continuity of open source software (OSS) projects. To attract newcomers and facilitate their onboarding, many OSS projects recommend tasks for newcomers, such as good first issues (GFIs). Previous studies have preliminarily investigated the effects of GFIs and techniques to identify suitable GFIs. However, it is still unclear whether just recommending tasks is enough and how significant mentoring is for newcomers. To better understand mentoring in OSS communities, we analyze the resolution process of 48,402 GFIs from 964 repositories through a mix-method approach. We investigate the extent, the mentorship structures, the discussed topics, and the relevance of expert involvement. We find that ~70% of GFIs have expert participation, with each GFI usually having one expert who makes two comments. Half of GFIs will receive their first expert comment within 8.5 hours after a newcomer comment. Through analysis of the collaboration networks of newcomers and experts, we observe that community mentorship presents four types of structure: centralized mentoring, decentralized mentoring, collaborative mentoring, and distributed mentoring. As for discussed topics, we identify 14 newcomer challenges and 18 expert mentoring content. By fitting the generalized linear models, we find that expert involvement positively correlates with newcomers' successful contributions but negatively correlates with newcomers' retention. Our study manifests the status and significance of mentoring in the OSS projects, which provides rich practical implications for optimizing the mentoring process and helping newcomers contribute smoothly and suecessfully,
DOI 原文 · arXiv · PDF（开放获取） · DBLP
@inproceedings{TanCWZZ23,
title = {Is It Enough to Recommend Tasks to Newcomers? Understanding Mentoring on Good First Issues},
author = {Xin Tan and Yiran Chen and Haohua Wu and Minghui Zhou and Li Zhang},
booktitle = {ICSE},
year = {2023},
doi = {10.1109/icse48619.2023.00064}
}