New Developers/Quarterly/2018-01

This is the second edition of the New Developers Quarterly, a report covering activities, metrics, surveys and lessons learned in the Onboarding New Developers program. This report covers October to December 2017.

Your questions and feedback are welcome in the Discussion page.

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Timeline
Newcomer-focused events, programs, and activities between October–December 2017:


 * October 5th How Technical Collaboration is bringing new developers into the Wikimedia movement, blogpost by Quim Gil
 * October 7th WikiFemHack, the first Wikimedia hackathon to encourage gender diversity in Greece, blogpost by Marios Magioladitis
 * October 13-15th Wikimedia mentors participated in the Google Summer of Code mentor summit at Google headquarters in Sunnyvale, California
 * October 19th Towards building an African Wikimedia Developer Community, blogpost by Felix Nartey and Derick Alangi
 * October 26th Wikimedia is taking part in Google Code-in 2017. 48 mentors will be mentoring students from November 28, 2017 to January 17, 2018 on both coding and non-coding related tasks
 * November 25th How two new Wikimedians spent their time at the Montreal Hackathon, blogpost by Melody Kramer
 * December 1st Wikimedia Foundation funds six Outreachy interns for round 15, blogpost by Srishti Sethi
 * December 9-10th Wikimedia's Developer Relations organized a workshop around Google Code-in for students of the ChickTech organization in San Francisco (more details)

Key findings
Learnings from the follow-up plan to retain new developers from Wikimedia Hackathon in Vienna and Montreal

As a first step to improving outreach and increasing retention of new developers, we sent personalized follow-up emails to 84 new developers who attended the Wikimedia Hackathon in Vienna and Montreal. The email included an invitation to participate in a post-event engagement research study and a question; if there is anyway, we could offer them help. 14% participants responded to the email, and 6% participated in the research study. It is tough to assess the usefulness of these emails and conclude anything significant from the study. However, we learned from the participants we chatted with that they got busy with their professional work after the Hackathon and were not contributing much to Wikimedia projects. But, they had gathered enough information at the hackathon that they could use if they want to start contributing again. We will continue with the follow-up strategy to learn more about new developers who attend Wikimedia events. (T163440)

Most of the newcomers struggle in understanding the code contribution process

From the survey results in both the current and the previous report, we found that new developers struggle initially in understanding the code contribution process, applying coding conventions, learning how to get around Gerrit, git-review, etc. We have been continuing to make progress on improving our related docs for new developers. We will continue to watch for improvements in this area in the next editions.

Some other findings:
 * Completion rate for the new developers survey has improved by 25% since our previous report
 * Some suggestions made by new developers for improvements are more volunteers time to help newcomers initially when they begin contributing, an IRC channel for newcomers, and easy steps in the task description for reproducing a problem

New developers metrics and trends
See also Technical Collaboration Metrics - Onboarding New Developers.

Volunteers contributing patches for review
XX volunteers contributed between October–December 2017. (Source)

New volunteers attracted
XX new volunteers contributed between October–December 2017. (Source)

QoQ : xx%. YoY : xx%.

New volunteers retained
Percentage of volunteers active one year (± 3 months) after their first contribution, out of all new volunteers attracted one year ago (between July–September 2016). (Source: Calculation on data)

QoQ : xx%. YoY : xx%.

Review of changesets by new volunteers
xxx changesets were contributed by new volunteers. (Source: Calculation on data . Data as of MM dd, 2017.)

Projects with most new volunteers
xx new volunteers contributed to xx repositories. (Source: "Repos by New Authors")

Outreach programs

 * Google Summer of Code 2017 (May–August 2017):
 * Out of 7 new developers who completed the internship, we retained XX developers
 * Outreachy Round 15 (December 2017–March 2018):
 * Attracted 6 new developers

Survey analysis
Read through below for a quick summary:

We sent a survey to 36 new developers who submitted code for the first time between September–November 2017. We used the shorter version of the survey designed for the previous quarterly report to understand more clearly demographics and background, motivations, challenges and needs of our new developers.

Out of the 36 new developers to whom we reached out, 18 (50%) completed the survey.

Demographics and background information

 * Respondents of the survey were from United States (3), India (3), Germany (2), Cameroon, China, Finland, Italy, New Zealand, Pakistan and United Kingdom
 * A little over half the respondents said they belong to the working professionals category
 * 67% identified themselves as male and 27% as female

Motivations
New developers indicated that they first heard about Wikimedia as a place to contributing code through a MediaWiki workshop in their area, their work colleagues, Outreachy, familiarity with Wikimedia tech (such as by using extensions, Toolforge, MediaWiki.org, or by hosting a wiki, etc. ).

Challenges

 * Some challenges that new developers face around Wikimedia infrastructure are: understanding the codebase, Gerrit, coding conventions, non-availability of projects in Github, determining who is the project owner or code reviewer, etc. Other behavioral challenges are deciding what task to work on, learning a language, lack of knowledge of MediaWiki, hesitating to ask questions, etc.
 * Learning resources and channels that new developers refer to when they get stuck: IRC, Google, Stack Overflow, MediaWiki pages, Phabricator, PHP manuals, API docs, asking an experienced developer, etc.

Experience contributing to Wikimedia
More than three-fourths of the respondents said they are satisfied with their experience contributing to Wikimedia. More than half of the respondents to this survey said they are likely to recommend Wikimedia for code contribution to friends and colleagues.

Suggestions for improvement
Here are some suggestions made by new developers (responses below have been only slightly edited):
 * How to documentation
 * An automated way to convert files to adhere to the coding style guide
 * GitHub pull requests
 * More volunteers time to help newcomers initially when they begin contributing
 * An IRC channel for new contributors where everyone is there to help one another
 * Easy steps in the task description to reproduce a problem



Actions items from the previous report
We discussed the possible actions items from the previous report and made some progress on them:
 * T177583: A CRM for technical collaboration
 * T161901: Phab[mw:Gerrit/Tutorial is way too much information for new contributors ]]
 * T173537: Can't view images on Phabricator but not on WP0
 * T178633: Make Wikipedia Android app a featured project for new developers