Related papers: The Introduction of README and CONTRIBUTING Files …
The maintenance and evolution of Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects demand the constant attraction of core developers. In this paper, we report the results of a survey with 52 developers, who recently became core contributors…
Software testing plays a crucial role in the contribution process of open-source projects. For example, contributions introducing new features are expected to include tests, and contributions with tests are more likely to be accepted.…
README files play an important role in providing installation-related instructions to software users and are widely used in open source software systems on platforms such as GitHub. However, these files often suffer from various…
Documenting frameworks provides its users and maintainers useful information on that software's architecture, design, and customization. Despite documentation's importance, the process of creating and maintaining it is considered to imply…
Open source software projects usually acknowledge contributions with text files, websites, and other idiosyncratic methods. These data sources are hard to mine, which is why contributorship is most frequently measured through changes to…
The README file serves as a critical source of information for gaining an overview and helping developers onboard to an Open Source Software (OSS) project. Yet, documentation issues persist; in particular, ``outdated'' documentation is…
Developers use and contribute to repositories on GitHub. Documentation present in the repositories serves as an important source by helping developers to understand, maintain and contribute to the project. Currently, documentation in a…
Readme in GitHub repositories serves as a preliminary source of information, and thus helps developers in understanding about the projects, for reuse or extension. Different types of contextual and structural content, which we refer to as…
Context and motivation: Contribution Management helps firms engaged in Open Source Software (OSS) ecosystems to motivate what they should contribute and when, but also what they should focus their resources on and to what extent. Such…
The availability of open-source projects facilitates developers to contribute and collaborate on a wide range of projects. As a result, the developer community contributing to such open-source projects is also increasing. Many of the…
While free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) is critical to global computing infrastructure, the maintenance of widely-adopted FLOSS packages is dependent on volunteer developers who select their own tasks. Risk of failure due to the…
The widespread adoption of Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) means that the ongoing maintenance of many widely used software components relies on the collaborative effort of volunteers who set their own priorities and choose their…
Attracting and retaining a steady stream of new contributors is crucial to ensuring the long-term survival of open-source software (OSS) projects. However, there are two key research gaps regarding recommendations for onboarding new…
Computational research and data analytics increasingly relies on complex ecosystems of open source software (OSS) "libraries" -- curated collections of reusable code that programmers import to perform a specific task. Software documentation…
While open source communities attract diverse contributors across the globe, only a few open source software repositories provide essential documentation, such as ReadMe or CONTRIBUTING files, in languages other than English. Recently,…
Newcomers to a software project must overcome many barriers before they can successfully place their first code contribution, and they often struggle to find information that is relevant to them. In this work, we argue that much of the…
End users positive response is essential for the success of any software. This is true for both commercial and Open Source Software (OSS). OSS is popular not only because of its availability, which is usually free but due to the user…
Despite the widespread adoption of open source software (OSS), its sustainability remains a critical concern, particularly in light of security vulnerabilities and the often inadequate end-of-service (EoS) processes for OSS projects as they…
README files play an essential role in shaping a developer's first impression of a software repository and in documenting the software project that the repository hosts. Yet, we lack a systematic understanding of the content of a typical…
The use of free and open source software is gaining momentum due to the ever increasing availability and use of the Internet. Organizations are also now adopting open source software, despite some reservations in particular regarding the…