一句话：通过 107,895 个 PR 的实证分析与调查，揭示 Apache 中隐性指导的普遍性及其对导师和学员的益处。
传统导师制常被视为二元、自上而下的学徒关系，忽略了开源软件开发日常活动中嵌入的非正式指导。本文定义并研究 implicit mentoring，即贡献者通过日常 OSS 活动中的指令与建议来指导他人。作者先通过相关文献综述、形成性访谈和成员校验界定该概念，随后对 37 个 Apache 项目的 Pull Request 进行实证研究，构建分类器提取隐性指导。对 107,895 个 PR 的分析表明，隐性指导确实通过代码评审发生，27.41% 的 PR 包含隐性指导，并对导师和学员都有益。研究还考察了其对贡献者贡献与学习轨迹的影响，并通过 N=231 的在线调查三角验证了开源贡献者视角下的潜在收益。
Mentoring is traditionally viewed as a dyadic, top-down apprenticeship. This perspective, however, overlooks other forms of informal mentoring taking place in everyday activities in which developers invest time and effort. Here, we investigate informal mentoring taking place in Open Source Software (OSS). We define a specific type of informal mentoring—implicit mentoring—situations where contributors guide others through instructions and suggestions embedded in everyday (OSS) activities. We defined implicit mentoring by first performing a review of related work on mentoring, and then through formative interviews with OSS contributors and member-checking. Next, through an empirical investigation of Pull Requests (PRs) in 37 Apache Projects, we built a classifier to extract implicit mentoring. Our analysis of 107,895 PRs shows that implicit mentoring does occur through code reviews (27.41% of all PRs included implicit mentoring) and is beneficial for both mentors and mentees. We analyzed the impact of implicit mentoring on OSS contributors by investigating their contributions and learning trajectories in their projects. Through an online survey (N=231), we then triangulated these results and identified the potential benefits of implicit mentoring from OSS contributors’ perspectives.
DOI 原文 ·
@inproceedings{paperbot7117,
title = {A case study of implicit mentoring, its prevalence, and impact in Apache},
author = {Zixuan Feng and Amreeta Chatterjee and Anita Sarma and Iftekhar Ahmed},
booktitle = {FSE},
year = {2022},
doi = {10.1145/3540250.3549167}
}