Attracting and retaining newcomers are critical aspects for OSS projects, as such projects rely on newcomers’ sustainable contributions. Considerable effort has been made to help newcomers by identifying and overcoming the barriers during the onboarding process. However, most newcomers eventually fail and drop out of their projects even after successful onboarding. Meanwhile, it has been long known that individuals’ early career stages profoundly impact their long-term career success. However, newcomers’ early careers are less investigated in SE research. In this paper, we sought to develop an empirical understanding of the relationships between newcomers’ dynamic contribution patterns in their early careers and their technical success. To achieve this goal, we compiled a dataset of newcomers’ contribution data from 54 large OSS projects under three different ecosystems and analyzed it with time series analysis and other statistical analysis techniques. Our analyses yield rich findings. The correlations between several contribution patterns and technical success were identified. In general, being consistent and persistent in newcomers’ early careers is positively associated with their technical success. While these correlations generally hold in all three ecosystems, we observed some differences in detailed contribution patterns correlated with technical success across ecosystems. In addition, we performed a case study to investigate whether another type of contributions, i.e., documentation contribution, could potentially have positive correlations with newcomers’ technical success. We discussed the implications and summarized practical recommendations to OSS newcomers. The insights gained from this work demonstrated the necessity of extending the focus of research and practice to newcomers’ early careers and hence shed light on future research in this direction.

中文翻译：

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良好的开端：OSS 新人早期职业生涯中的动态贡献模式和技术成功


吸引和留住新人是 OSS 项目的关键方面，因为此类项目依赖于新人的可持续贡献。我们付出了大量努力来帮助新人识别并克服入职过程中的障碍。然而，大多数新人即使在成功入职后最终也会失败并退出他们的项目。与此同时，众所周知，个人的早期职业阶段对其长期职业成功有着深远的影响。然而，SE 研究中对新人早期职业生涯的调查较少。在本文中，我们试图对新人早期职业生涯中的动态贡献模式与其技术成功之间的关系进行实证理解。为了实现这一目标，我们整理了三个不同生态系统下的 54 个大型 OSS 项目的新人贡献数据集，并通过时间序列分析和其他统计分析技术进行了分析。我们的分析产生了丰富的发现。确定了几种贡献模式和技术成功之间的相关性。一般来说，新人在早期职业生涯中保持一致和坚持与他们的技术成功呈正相关。虽然这些相关性在所有三个生态系统中普遍存在，但我们观察到与跨生态系统的技术成功相关的详细贡献模式存在一些差异。此外，我们还进行了一项案例研究，以调查另一种类型的贡献（即文档贡献）是否可能与新人的技术成功存在正相关关系。我们讨论了这些影响，并总结了对 OSS 新手的实用建议。 从这项工作中获得的见解证明了将研究和实践的重点扩展到新人早期职业生涯的必要性，从而为该方向的未来研究指明了方向。