How Can I Contribute?
Jacob Krüger, Sebastian Nielebock, Robert Heumüller · 2020
Developers collaboratively implement large-scale industrial and open-source projects. Such projects pose several challenges for developers, as they require considerable knowledge about the project and its development processes, for instance, to fix bugs or implement new features. Understanding what information developer communities codify on how to contribute to their project is crucial, for example, to onboard new developers or for researchers to scope analysis techniques. In this paper, we report the results of a qualitative analysis of 25 Unix-like distributions, focusing on what information the communities codify publicly on contributing. The results reveal no dedicated strategies to codify information on contribution or development practices. Still, non-technical contributions are easy to identify, while information on the development is hard to collect---and mostly concerned with versioning and bug reporting. Our insights help to understand information-provisioning strategies, identify information sources, and scope analyses.