Understanding Skills for OSS Communities on GitHub

TL;DR

This paper identifies and models the diverse skills required for OSS contributors on GitHub, based on a survey of 455 contributors, highlighting motivations, perceptions, and implications for OSS platform design.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive 45-skill model for OSS contributors, integrating social and technical aspects, and offers design recommendations for OSS tools and platforms.

Findings

Contributors are motivated to improve and share skills.

Many skills are perceived as beneficial for OSS success.

The model covers 9 skill categories including technical and interpersonal skills.

Abstract

The development of open source software (OSS) is a broad field which requires diverse skill sets. For example, maintainers help lead the project and promote its longevity, technical writers assist with documentation, bug reporters identify defects in software, and developers program the software. However, it is unknown which skills are used in OSS development as well as OSS contributors' general attitudes towards skills in OSS. In this paper, we address this gap by administering a survey to a diverse set of 455 OSS contributors. Guided by these responses as well as prior literature on software development expertise and social factors of OSS, we develop a model of skills in OSS that considers the many contexts OSS contributors work in. This model has 45 skills in the following 9 categories: technical skills, working styles, problem solving, contribution types, project-specific skills, interpersonal skills, external relations, management, and characteristics. Through a mix of qualitative and quantitative analyses, we find that OSS contributors are actively motivated to improve skills and perceive many benefits in sharing their skills with others. We then use this analysis to derive a set of design implications and best practices for those who incorporate skills into OSS tools and platforms, such as GitHub.