A Preliminary Study of Contributing Guidelines in OSS Projects

Most open source software (OSS) projects are collaboratively developed by the community developers from all over the world. To onboard newcomers and improve collaboration efficiency, OSS projects usually adopt a contributing guideline to elaborate on how to make contributions to the project. Prior research has studied on the impact of contributing guidelines, nevertheless, the adoption and revision of contributing guidelines was not well studied. In this paper, we conducted a preliminary, quantitative analysis of contributing guidelines in OSS projects in terms of what kind of projects are more likely to adopt the contributing guideline, what is the appropriate timing for its adoption, and how frequently it is revised. Our results contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of contributing guidelines in OSS projects.