Contributor Support for Maintaining Opensource Software. A Case Study of BIMserver

Abstract

Maintaining software requires significant effort, as it goes well beyond the creation of new features, and includes updates to the existing code as well as communication with users. Cutting short on these activities can threaten a software project’s existence. The consequences are even more drastic for opensource software with limited resources. In this paper, we present the Opensource BIMserver, a mature opensource server software that enables users to store and manage building information in a standardized format in a database, as a case study to illustrate the challenges of software maintenance and the structured approach, strategies and measures we employed to support new contributors during the onboarding process. The set of complementary measures includes community involvement, agile practices, pair-programming, guided issue processing, bite-sized tasks, targeted reading recommendations. While most of these methods as well as a structured onboarding process are common in commercial software development settings, they are rarely implemented in opensource or research context. We exemplify our approach with actions taken in four identified pivotal areas of software maintenance — namely documentation, issue processing, dependency management, and automated testing.