Mentoring in Software Teams Mentoring in Software Teams
How to design mentoring that helps new developers become productive and stay.
What this presentation covers
What this presentation covers
What this presentation covers
What blocks new developers
Newcomers hit five kinds of barriers
A review of 20 studies found 15 barriers that newcomers face in open source.
- Social interaction
- Prior knowledge
- Finding where to start
- Documentation
- Technical hurdles
Does mentoring speed things up
Mentored developers contribute sooner
Mentored newcomers became active earlier than those who joined the usual way.
When onboarding falls short
Easy first bugs do not keep people
At Mozilla, program newcomers were half as likely to become long-term contributors.
- Did the program keep newcomers? Half as many stayed long term.
- Did it help anyone? Those who stayed found it valuable.
Choosing first tasks
Choose first tasks with care
At Microsoft, first tasks shaped how new developers learned, gained confidence and fit in.
- Learning the code base and the tools
- Confidence a first change that ships
- Belonging knowing who to ask
Pair programming evidence
Pairing costs effort, buys speed or quality
A meta-analysis found slightly better quality, shorter duration and more total effort.
- Quality small gain
- Duration medium gain, done sooner
- Effort medium cost, two people
When to pair
Use pairing on complex work for quality
Pairs were faster on simple tasks and wrote better code on complex ones.
- Simple tasks faster, but lower quality
- Complex tasks higher quality, more effort
The first week
Clear technical hurdles before day one
Technical hurdles are one of the five barrier groups newcomers face.
- The project builds on the first day
- A named mentor outside the manager
- A starter task with a reviewer
- A map of who owns what
Code review as mentoring
Make code review a teaching moment
Reviewers can explain why a change matters, not only what to fix.
Sources
The research behind this presentation
- Steinmacher, I., Graciotto Silva, M. A., Gerosa, M. A. & Redmiles, D. F. (2015) A systematic literature review on the barriers faced by newcomers to open source software projects Information and Software Technology, 59, 67-85
- Fagerholm, F., Sanchez Guinea, A., Münch, J. & Borenstein, J. (2014) The role of mentoring and project characteristics for onboarding in open source software projects Proceedings of the 8th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM 2014), 1-10
- Labuschagne, A. & Holmes, R. (2015) Do onboarding programs work? 2015 IEEE/ACM 12th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR), 381-385
- Ju, A., Sajnani, H., Kelly, S. & Herzig, K. (2021) A case study of onboarding in software teams: Tasks and strategies 2021 IEEE/ACM 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), 613-623
- Hannay, J. E., Dybå, T., Arisholm, E. & Sjøberg, D. I. K. (2009) The effectiveness of pair programming: A meta-analysis Information and Software Technology, 51(7), 1110-1122
Help new developers ship and stay
Clear the barriers, pick first tasks with care and pair where it pays.