An Initial Exploration of the “Good First Issue” Label for Newcomer Developers
Jan Willem Davis Alderliesten (Student TU Delft)
Andy Zaidman (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
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Abstract
In order to help newcomers to open source projects identify tasks that are suitable to them and their level of expertise within the project, issues can get the good first issue label on the GitHub platform. In this paper we report on a preliminary investigation of good first issues in terms of how they effective they are for developer onboarding and task completion. We find that, although good first issues are effective at developer onboarding, and developers perceive good first issues as being useful, changes can be made to the types of tasks suggested as good first issues to match the types of initial contributions made by newcomers11This paper is based on the MSc thesis of J.W.D. Alderliesten [1].