Newcomer Candidate: Characterizing Contributions of a Novice Developer to GitHub

The ability for an Open Source Software (OSS) project to attract, onboard, and retain any newcomer is vital to its livelihood. Evidence suggests more new users are joining GitHub, however, the extent to which they contribute to OSS projects is unknown. In this study, we coin the term newcomer candidate to describe a novice developer that is a new user to the GitHub platform, with the intention to later onboard an OSS project. Our objective is to track and characterize their initial contributions using a mixed-method approach. Our results show that 68% of newcomer candidates are more likely to practice non-social coding, 86% tend to work on forward-engineering activities in their first commits, and 53% show their interest of targeting non-software repositories. Our quantitative analysis did match only 3% of newcomer candidates contributions to established OSS repositories, yet 70% of newcomer candidates claim to already onboard an OSS project. This study opens up new avenues for future work, especially in terms of targeting potential contributors to onboard an existing OSS project. More practical applications would be tool support to (i) recommend practical examples that OSS project teams can use to lower their barriers for a newcomer candidate to successfully make a contribution and (ii) recommend suitable repositories for newcomer candidates based on their preference. Researchers can explore strategies to sustain newcomer candidate activities until they are ready to onboard an OSS project.