Anita Sarma

Oregon State University | OSU · School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Mentorship in open source software (OSS) is a vital, multifaceted process that includes onboarding newcomers, fostering skill development, and enhancing community building. This study examines task-focused mentoring strategies that help mentees complete their tasks and the ideal personal qualities and outcomes of good mentorship in OSS communities....

Generative AI (genAI) tools (e.g., ChatGPT, Copilot) have become ubiquitous in software engineering (SE). As SE educators, it behooves us to understand the consequences of genAI usage among SE students and to create a holistic view of where these tools can be successfully used. Through 16 reflective interviews with SE students, we explored their ac...

The sustainability of open source software (OSS) projects hinges on contributor retention. Interpersonal challenges can inhibit a feeling of welcomeness among contributors, particularly from underrepresented groups, which impacts their decision to continue with the project. How much this impact is, varies among individuals, underlining the importan...

Igor Steinmacher, Bianca Trinkenreich, Marco Gerosa, and Anita Sarma

Md Montaser Hamid, Amreeta Chatterjee, Mariam Guizani, Andrew Anderson, Fatima Moussaoui, Sarah Yang, Isaac Tijerina Escobar, Anita Sarma, and Margaret Burnett

Generative AI (genAI) tools, such as ChatGPT or Copilot, are advertised to improve developer productivity and are being integrated into software development. However, misaligned trust, skepticism, and usability concerns can impede the adoption of such tools. Research also indicates that AI can be exclusionary, failing to support diverse users adequ...

Research within sociotechnical domains, such as software engineering, fundamentally requires the human perspective. Nevertheless, traditional qualitative data collection methods suffer from difficulties in participant recruitment, scaling, and labor intensity. This vision paper proposes a novel approach to qualitative data collection in software en...

Burnout affects software developers' mental and physical well-being and contributes to their turnover, which has generated strong industry concerns. Our previous research showed that the lack of sense of belonging is linked to higher levels of burnout in software developers. Sense of belonging is also key to making people more resilient, and have b...

Labeling issues with the skills required to complete them can help contributors to choose tasks in Open Source Software projects. However, manually labeling issues is time-consuming and error-prone, and current automated approaches are mostly limited to classifying issues as bugs/non-bugs. We investigate the feasibility and relevance of automatical...

Journal-First submission to ESEM 2023

Emerging research shows that individual differences in how people use technology sometimes cluster by socioeconomic status (SES) and that when technology is not socioeconomically inclusive, low-SES individuals may abandon it. To understand how to improve technology's SES-inclusivity, we present a multi-phase case study on SocioEconomicMag (SESMag),...

Labeling issues with the skills required to complete them can help contributors to choose tasks in Open Source Software projects. However, manually labeling issues is time-consuming and error-prone, and current automated approaches are mostly limited to classifying issues as bugs/non-bugs. We investigate the feasibility and relevance of automatical...

Diversity and inclusion in open source software (OSS) is a multifaceted concept that arises from differences in contributors' gender, seniority, language, region, and other characteristics. D&I has received growing attention in OSS ecosystems and projects, and various programs have been implemented to foster contributor diversity. However, we do no...

Company engagement in open source (OSS) is now the new norm. From large technology companies to startups, companies are participating in the OSS ecosystem by open-sourcing their technology, sponsoring projects through funding or paid developer time. However, our understanding of the OSS ecosystem is rooted in the 'old world' model where individual...

Social coding platforms such as GitHub allows software developers to work collaboratively. However, if such platforms do not support specific cognitive styles, they disproportionately impact newcomers with these styles, especially those from underrepresented groups such as women. Research shows that the cognitive styles that are common to underrepr...

Job burnout is a type of work-related stress associated with a state of physical or emotional exhaustion that also involves a sense of reduced accomplishment and loss of personal identity. Burnt out can affect one's physical and mental health and has become a leading industry concern and can result in high workforce turnover. Through an empirical s...

The sense of belonging to a community is a basic human need that impacts an individuals behavior, long-term engagement, and job satisfaction, as revealed by research in disciplines such as psychology, healthcare, and education. Despite much research on how to retain developers in Open Source Software projects and other virtual, peer-production comm...

Mentoring is traditionally viewed as a dyadic, top-down apprenticeship. This perspective, however, overlooks other forms of informal mentoring taking place in everyday activities in which developers invest time and effort. Here, we investigate informal mentoring taking place in Open Source Software (OSS). We define a specific type of informal mento...

Women are underrepresented in Open Source Software (OSS) projects, as a result of which, not only do women lose career and skill development opportunities, but the projects themselves suffer from a lack of diversity of perspectives. Practitioners and researchers need to understand more about the phenomenon; however, studies about women in open sour...

[Background] Selecting an appropriate task is challenging for Open Source Software (OSS) project newcomers and a variety of strategies can help them in this process. [Aims] In this research, we compare the perspective of maintainers, newcomers, and existing contributors about the importance of strategies to support this process. Our goal is to iden...

[Background] Selecting an appropriate task is challenging for Open Source Software (OSS) project newcomers and a variety of strategies can help them in this process. [Aims] In this research, we compare the perspective of maintainers, newcomers, and existing contributors about the importance of strategies to support this process. Our goal is to iden...

Participation in Open Source Software (OSS) projects offers real software development experience for students and other newcomers seeking to develop their skills. However, onboarding to an OSS project brings various challenges, including finding a suitable task among various open issues. Selecting an appropriate starter task requires newcomers to i...

Cognitive biases are hardwired behaviors that influence developer actions and can set them on an incorrect course of action, necessitating backtracking. Although researchers have found that cognitive biases occur in development tasks in controlled lab studies, we still do not know how these biases affect developers' everyday behavior. Without such...

Although some previous research has found ways to find inclusivity bugs (biases in software that introduce inequities), little attention has been paid to how to go about fixing such bugs. Without a process to move from finding to fixing, acting upon such findings is an ad-hoc activity, at the mercy of the skills of each individual developer. To add...

Open Source Software (OSS) Foundations and projects are investing in creating Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) initiatives. However, little is known about contributors' perceptions about the usefulness and success of such initiatives. We aim to close this gap by investigating how contributors perceive the state of D&I in their community. In collaborat...

Mentoring is traditionally viewed as a dyadic, top-down apprenticeship. This perspective, however, overlooks other forms of informal mentoring taking place in everyday activities in which developers invest time and effort, but remain unacknowledged. Here, we investigate the different flavors of mentoring in Open Source Software (OSS) to define and...

Tools and artifacts produced by open source software (OSS) have been woven into the foundation of the technology industry. To keep this foundation intact, the open source community needs to actively invest in sustainable approaches to bring in new contributors and nurture existing ones. We take a first step at this by collaboratively designing a ma...

HCI researchers' and practitioners' awareness of intersectionality has been expanding, producing knowledge, recommendations, and prototypes for supporting intersectional populations. However, doing intersectional HCI work is uniquely expensive: it leads to a combinatorial explosion of empirical work (expense 1), and little of the work on one inters...

End users are increasingly using trigger-action platforms like If-This-Then-That (IFTTT) to create applets to connect smart-home devices and services. However, there are inherent implicit risks in using such applets—even non-malicious ones—as sensitive information may leak through their use in certain contexts ( e.g., where the device is located, w...

Mentoring is a well-known way to help newcomers to Open Source Software (OSS) projects overcome initial contribution barriers. Through mentoring, newcomers learn to acquire essential technical, social, and organizational skills. Despite the importance of OSS mentors, they are understudied in the literature. Understanding who OSS project mentors are...

Open source communities hosted in large foundations operate in a complex socio-technical ecosystem, which includes a heterogeneous mix of projects and stakeholders. Previous work has thus far investigated the challenges faced in OSS communities from the point of view of specific stakeholders, primarily at the level of individual projects. None have...

Success in Open Source Software (OSS) is often perceived as an exclusively code-centric endeavor. This perception can exclude a variety of individuals with a diverse set of skills and backgrounds, in turn helping exacerbate the current diversity & inclusion imbalance in OSS. Because ones perspective of success can affect ones personal, professional...

Success in Open Source Software (OSS) is often perceived as an exclusively code-centric endeavor. This perception can exclude a variety of individuals with a diverse set of skills and backgrounds, in turn helping create the current diversity \& inclusion imbalance in OSS. Because people's perspectives of success affect their personal, professional,...

Participation of women in Open Source Software (OSS) is very unbalanced, despite various efforts to improve diversity. This is concerning not only because women do not get the chance of career and skill developments afforded by OSS, but also because OSS projects suffer from a lack of diversity of thoughts because of a lack of diversity in their pro...

Context Recruiters and practitioners are increasingly relying on online activities of developers to find a suitable candidate. Past empirical studies have identified technical and soft skills that managers use in online peer production sites when making hiring decisions. However, finding candidates with relevant skills is a labor-intensive task for...

Abstract—Open Source Software projects add labels to open issues to help contributors choose tasks. However, manually labeling issues is time-consuming and error-prone. Current automatic approaches for creating labels are mostly limited to classifying issues as a bug/non-bug. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility and relevance of labeling i...

Open Source Software projects add labels to open issues to help contributors choose tasks. However, manually labeling issues is time-consuming and error-prone. Current automatic approaches for creating labels are mostly limited to classifying issues as a bug/non-bug. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility and relevance of labeling issues wit...

Open Source Software projects add labels to open issues to help contributors choose tasks. However, manually labeling issues is time-consuming and error-prone. Current automatic approaches for creating labels are mostly limited to classifying issues as a bug/non-bug. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility and relevance of labeling issues wit...

A well-known way to help newcomers overcome initial contribution challenges is mentoring. This strategy has proven effective in offline and online communities, and to some extent has been employed in Open Source Software (OSS) projects. Through mentoring, newcomers are trained to acquire the technical, social, and organizational skills they need. D...

Open Source Software (OSS) has changed drastically over the last decade, with OSS projects now producing a large ecosystem of popular products, involving industry participation, and providing professional career opportunities. But our field's understanding of what motivates people to contribute to OSS is still fundamentally grounded in studies from...

End users are increasingly using trigger-action platforms like, If-This-Then-That (IFTTT) to create applets to connect smart home devices and services. However, there are inherent risks in using such applets -- even non-malicious ones -- as sensitive information may leak through their use in certain contexts (e.g., where the device is located, who...

Gender inclusivity in software is gaining attention from researchers and practitioners, with some seeing it as a nonfunctional requirement. To investigate how gender inclusivity can be incorporated into creating software, we gathered data during periods ranging from 5 months to 3.5 years from 10 software teams that used the Gender Inclusiveness Mag...

Open Source Software (OSS) development is a collaborative endeavor where expert developers, distributed around the globe create software solutions. Given this characteristic, OSS communities have been studied as technical communities, where stakeholders join and evolve in their careers based on their (often voluntary) code contributions to the proj...

Software developers who want to start contributing to an Open Source Software (OSS) project often struggle to find appropriate first tasks. The voluntary, self-organizing distribution of decentralized labor and the distinct nature of some OSS projects intensifies this challenge. Mentors, who work closely with newcomers, develop strategies to recomm...

There are often multiple ways to implement the same requirement in source code. Different implementation choices can result in code snippets that are similar, and have been defined in multiple ways: code clones, examples, simions and variants. Currently, there is a lack of a consistent and unambiguous definition of such types of code snippets. Here...

Project comprehension questions, such as “which modified artifacts can affect my work” and “how can I identify the developers who should be assigned to a given task” are difficult to answer, require an analysis of the project and its data, are context specific, and cannot always be pre-defined. Current research approaches are restricted to post hoc...

Previous research has revealed that newcomer women are disproportionately affected by gender-biased barriers in open source software (OSS) projects. However, this research has focused mainly on social/cultural factors, neglecting the software tools and infrastructure. To shed light on how OSS tools and infrastructure might factor into OSS barriers...

Merge conflicts are known to cause extra effort for developers, but little is known about their effect on software. While some research has been done, many questions remain. To better understand merge conflicts and their impact we performed an empirical study about the types, frequency, and impact of merge conflicts, where impact is measured in ter...

While open-source software has become ubiquitous, its sustainability is in question: without a constant supply of contributor effort, open-source projects are at risk. While prior work has extensively studied the motivations of open-source contributors in general, relatively little is known about how people choose which project to contribute to, be...

Merge conflicts occur when developers make concurrent changes to the same part of the code. They are an inevitable and disruptive aspect of collaborative software development. Thus tool builders and researchers have focused on the prevention and automatic resolution of merge conflicts. However, there is little empirical knowledge about how develope...