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Conversational Bot for Newcomers Onboarding to Open Source Projects

Published: 25 September 2020 Publication History

Abstract

This paper targets the problems newcomers face when onboarding to open source projects and the low retention rate of newcomers. Open source software projects are becoming increasingly more popular. Many major companies have started building open source software. Unfortunately, many newcomers only commit once to an open source project before moving on to another project. Even worse, many novices struggle with joining open source communities and end up leaving quickly, sometimes before their first successful contribution. In this paper, we propose a conversational bot that would recommend projects to newcomers and assist in the onboarding to the open source community. The bot would be able to provide helpful resources, such as Stack Overflow related content. It would also be able to recommend human mentors. We believe that this bot would improve newcomers' experience by providing support not only during their first contribution, but by acting as an agent to engage them to the project.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    ICSEW'20: Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering Workshops
    June 2020
    831 pages
    ISBN:9781450379632
    DOI:10.1145/3387940
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    Published: 25 September 2020

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    Author Tags

    1. bot
    2. newcomer
    3. onboarding
    4. open source software

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    June 27 - July 19, 2020
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    • (2024)A Disruptive Research Playbook for Studying Disruptive InnovationsACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/367817233:8(1-29)Online publication date: 15-Jul-2024
    • (2024)A Transformer-based Approach for Augmenting Software Engineering Chatbots DatasetsProceedings of the 18th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement10.1145/3674805.3686695(359-370)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2024
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