An Investigation on the Availability of Contribution Information in Open-Source Projects

Abstract

Open-source projects commonly receive new feature requests from different types of users from layperson end users to developers, who actively contribute code to the project. However, the submission of new feature requests and the processes adopted for handling them is not always clear. In this work, we aim at investigating the availability of the contribution information, and in particular on the new feature requests, on 66 out of the 100 most starred GitHub projects. We examined the contribution guidelines and other documentation from those 66 projects. We particularly searched for whether the projects openly welcomed new contributions, such as feature requests. Our finding shows that even the most starred GitHub projects are often not reporting information on how to contribute and, in particular, how new feature requests are managed.