Understanding newcomers success in open source community

Abstract

Newcomers and volunteers contributions play an effective role the open source software (OSS) success. This role is confirmed through a rigor set of studies in software engineering discipline. As Open source projects are developed based on social and technical efforts, then it is very important for newcomers to empower their socio-technical skills. This paper focuses on newcomers' success in open source community by analyzing newcomers' reputation on their initial activities in a social coding environment such as GitHub. By applying mining software repositories (MSR) techniques on GitHub data we found the main projects' attributes where successful newcomers contributed to them. These attributes can help other newcomers to select the right project for their initial activities.