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Open source barriers to entry, revisited: a sociotechnical perspective

Published: 27 May 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Research has revealed that significant barriers exist when entering Open-Source Software (OSS) communities and that women disproportionately experience such barriers. However, this research has focused mainly on social/cultural factors, ignoring the environment itself --- the tools and infrastructure. To shed some light onto how tools and infrastructure might somehow factor into OSS barriers to entry, we conducted a field study with five teams of software professionals, who worked through five use-cases to analyze the tools and infrastructure used in their OSS projects. These software professionals found tool/infrastructure barriers in 7% to 71% of the use-case steps that they analyzed, most of which are tied to newcomer barriers that have been established in the literature. Further, over 80% of the barrier types they found include attributes that are biased against women.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    ICSE '18: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering
    May 2018
    1307 pages
    ISBN:9781450356381
    DOI:10.1145/3180155
    • Conference Chair:
    • Michel Chaudron,
    • General Chair:
    • Ivica Crnkovic,
    • Program Chairs:
    • Marsha Chechik,
    • Mark Harman
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    Published: 27 May 2018

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    1. gender
    2. newcomer
    3. open source software

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