Supporting Newcomers in Software Development Projects

The recent and fast expansion of OSS (Open-source software) communities has fostered research on how open source projects evolve and how their communities interact. Several research studies show that the inflow of new developers plays an important role in the longevity and the success of OSS projects. However such research effort did not generate yet concrete results in support retention and training of project newcomers. In this thesis dissertation we investigated problems arising when newcomers join software projects and possible solutions to support them (developing tools and/or techniques) during the integration in the development team. Among the various recommenders we defined (i) a tool able to suggest appropriate mentors to newcomers during the training stage; then with the aim at supporting newcomers during program comprehension we defined other two recommenders: a tool that (ii) generates high quality source code summaries and another tool able to (iii) provide descriptions of specific source code elements. For future work we plan to improve the proposed recommenders and to integrate other kind of recommenders to better support newcomers in OSS projects.