TY - GEN
T1 - An Investigation on the Availability of Contribution Information in Open-Source Projects
AU - Zhang, Zheying
AU - Sievi-Korte, Outi
AU - Virta, Ulla Talvikki
AU - Jarvinen, Hannu Matti
AU - Taibi, Davide
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 IEEE.
PY - 2021/9
Y1 - 2021/9
N2 - Open-source projects commonly receive new feature requests from different types of users from layperson end users to developers, who actively contribute code to the project. However, the submission of new feature requests and the processes adopted for handling them is not always clear. In this work, we aim at investigating the availability of the contribution information, and in particular on the new feature requests, on 66 out of the 100 most starred GitHub projects. We examined the contribution guidelines and other documentation from those 66 projects. We particularly searched for whether the projects openly welcomed new contributions, such as feature requests. Our finding shows that even the most starred GitHub projects are often not reporting information on how to contribute and, in particular, how new feature requests are managed.
AB - Open-source projects commonly receive new feature requests from different types of users from layperson end users to developers, who actively contribute code to the project. However, the submission of new feature requests and the processes adopted for handling them is not always clear. In this work, we aim at investigating the availability of the contribution information, and in particular on the new feature requests, on 66 out of the 100 most starred GitHub projects. We examined the contribution guidelines and other documentation from those 66 projects. We particularly searched for whether the projects openly welcomed new contributions, such as feature requests. Our finding shows that even the most starred GitHub projects are often not reporting information on how to contribute and, in particular, how new feature requests are managed.
KW - New contributions
KW - Open Source
KW - Software ethics
U2 - 10.1109/SEAA53835.2021.00020
DO - 10.1109/SEAA53835.2021.00020
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85119198493
T3 - Proceedings - 2021 47th Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications, SEAA 2021
SP - 86
EP - 90
BT - Proceedings - 2021 47th Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications, SEAA 2021
A2 - Baldassarre, Maria Teresa
A2 - Scanniello, Giuseppe
A2 - Skavhaug, Amund
PB - IEEE
T2 - Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications
Y2 - 1 September 2021 through 3 September 2021
ER -