Open source software (OSS) development, as any social movement, is driven by its ideologies, namely OSS ideologies [6]. Understanding OSS ideologies could provide significant insights into open source development, since OSS ideologies determine and influence the dynamics and outcomes of open source development [1, 2]. Assessing OSS ideologies within open source projects could bring various benefits to OSS practitioners, e.g., the owners and the maintainers of open source projects could identify important ideological elements that were previously ignored, and could improve open source development accordingly. Therefore, with such an assessment of OSS ideologies, institutional and individual stakeholders who are interested in open source development could make informed decisions when interacting with open source projects.

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.

Global software development (GSD) done by geographically distributed teams of developers is one of the most common ways of developing software nowadays. Though GSD has various benefits, it also introduces challenges that have led to a plethora of research. This paper analyzes research papers published in top software engineering venues in recent years (2009-2018) focusing on team collaboration in order to understand the trend in GSD research. Out of 4,292 papers published in these venues, we found 33 papers that focused on team collaboration in the context of GSD. We study the kinds of data used in these papers and classify them into primary data (i.e., interview and observation data) and secondary data (i.e., repository and communication data) and found that interview data is the dominant type of data in these papers. We also found that the strength of evidence presented in most papers tends to be moderate.