Figure 4.6: The shares of affiliations. Illustration from Article IV.
if the number of independent (non-aligned) individuals would decrease, a conflict between community-driven and commercial motivations would be evident. In this case, an an intervention would have to be planned and executed. As a conclusion, Article IV invites future research on how similar analysis approaches could be linked with established productivity metrics of software development, and how the supportive tools of hybrid OSS communities could be developed further with similar, visual analysis approaches.
4.5 Article V: The newcomer’s perspective
The objective of Article V, ”Entering an ecosystem: The developer’s per-spective to the hybrid OSS landscape”, was to understand how hybrid OSS development communities could be made more welcoming for new develop-ers. Existing research had focused on how developer communities should be organized to accommodate participation (De Noni et al., 2011; West
& O’Mahony, 2008), what factors help entry and onboarding of develop-ers (Fagerholm, Sanchez Guinea, M¨unch, & Borenstein, 2014; Fagerholm, Sanchez Guinea, Borenstein, & M¨unch, 2014), and which traits healthy and welcoming communities should display (Jansen et al., 2009; Wynn, 2007).
However, connections between the community context and the developer’s experience had largely been unexplored, due to the lack of a common vo-cabulary in describing the community phenomena (Alves et al., 2017a). To fill this gap, Article V chose the observational viewpoint of a new software developer and positioned the hybrid, OSS development model based munity as an experiential learning environment. We structured the com-munity with an established model of contextual factors in personal learning (Bronfenbrenner, 1979) and deployed it with vocabulary of the hybrid OSS community context based on existing research- and practitioner knowledge.
This application was synthesized by the authors and validated through three interviews with community management practitioners. The work contributes to to RQ1 by presenting how the developer community can be organized as a learning environment. It answers RQ4 by offering a new perspective on how software developers could be facilitated by creating entry paths that take into consideration how people discover the structures of the developer community’s landscape.
As a result, Figure 4.7 organizes the developer community environ-ment as tiers, depending on their proximity and everyday significance to the learner. We found that the closest to the individual, the community
”microsystem” manifested as the source code, development tools, the de-veloper’s personal responsibilities and contributions, along with the peers that the developer interacted with. Around these, the community’s ”ex-osystem” was formed by the overall software architecture and long-term plans, the developer community’s decision-making organization and gov-ernance model, the developer community’s social dynamics and its power structures. These two were connected by a ”mesosystem” of the develop-ment community’s processes. As the learning environdevelop-ment’s exterior layer,
”macrosystem”, we placed the software ecosystem of the hybrid, OSS model based development community. At the same level, we positioned the cul-tural and ideological backdrop of the OSS movement, and the landscape of technological, legal and business related trends. Bronfenbrenner added to this ecosystem model the layer of ”chronosystem”, denoting that all the layers have symbiotic relationships with each other and, as for the ever-evolving nature of reality, they are subject to changes in time. Table 4.4 explains these characteristics in more detail.
Article V invites new research by bold, experimental research designs that address the interrelationships, continuity and change in the hybrid OSS ecosystem context. This is encouraged due to the existing, rich ex-plorations of the Bronfenbrenner’s model in social sciences (documented in (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006)). In the more distant future, the
4.5. ARTICLE V: THE NEWCOMER’S PERSPECTIVE 39
Figure 4.7: Learning environment model of a hybrid, OSS development model based community. Illustration from Article V.
verified model could be used in discovering metrics, which operationalize the health of developer communities in terms of their ability to intake and retain contributors. This could provide new practical understanding on which factors should be placed in the limelight of developer community management while designing entry paths for new developers and facilitat-ing their personal validation as new, productive members of a hybrid, OSS development model based community.
Table 4.4: Examples of learning environment model’s properties. Table from Article V.
Individual
Personal Competencies, goals, motivations and feelings.
Microsystem
Personal Knowledge, tasks, contributions, responsibilities, status/rank as a developer community member.
Stakeholders Requirements engineers, code authors, committers, reviewers and maintainers.
Team members and personal mentors.
Resources Software source code. Personal development tools and common platforms:
requirements management systems, code review/testing and continuous inte-gration tools, shared knowledge repositories.
Mesosystem
Organization of production
Code submission-, review-, testing-, integration- and release processes. Col-laborative relationships amongst the developer community’s members.
Exosystem
General Architecture of the software product. Rules and conventions. Licensing and IPR strategy. Organization and governance of the community and its orches-trator.
Stakeholders Different project teams and sub-communities. Project lead and high-level decision-making organizations, software users. Goals of partner organizations and keystone players.
Macrosystem
General Developments of related and common technologies, industry state of the prac-tice, technology standardization, business and the marketplace. Strategic al-liances.
Ideology FLOSS principles and their project-specific adaptation. Appreciation of self-fulfillment, diversity, equality and consensus-driven decision-making.