New Developers/Quarterly/2018-04

This is the third edition of the New Developers Quarterly, a report covering activities, metrics, surveys and lessons learned in the Onboarding New Developers program. This report covers January to March 2018.

Your questions and feedback are welcome in the User talk:SSethi (WMF)/Quarterly/2018-04 Discussion page.

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Timeline
Newcomer-focused events, programs, and activities between January–March 2018:



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

Volunteers contributing patches for review
162 volunteers contributed between January–March 2018. (Source)

QoQ : +15.7%. YoY : +15.7%.

New volunteers attracted
54 new volunteers contributed between January–March 2018. (Source)

QoQ : +10.2%. YoY : +14.9%.

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

QoQ : +133.0%. YoY : +166.8%.

Review of changesets by new volunteers
236 changesets were contributed by new volunteers. (Source: Calculation on data . Changeset status data as of 17 April 2018.)

Projects with most new volunteers
54 new volunteers contributed to 128 repositories. (Source: "Repos by New Authors")

Outreach events

 * Wikimedia Hackathon 2017 (May 2017):
 * Attracted 37 new volunteers.
 * Retained 1 new developer who was active three quarters after the event (January–March 2018). (Source)
 * Wikimania Hackathon 2017 (August 2017):
 * Attracted 47 new volunteers.
 * Retained 2 new volunteers who were active two quarter after the event (January–March 2018). (Source)

Survey analysis
Read through below for a quick summary:

We sent a survey to 51 new developers who submitted code for the first time between December 2017–February 2018 with a goal to understand more clearly demographics and background, motivations, challenges and needs of our new developers.

Out of the 51 new developers to whom we reached out, 17 (19.6%) completed the survey.

Demographics and background information

 * Respondents of the survey were from India (4), United States (3), Côte d’Ivoire (2), Germany (2), Canada, China, France, Hungary, Nepal, New Zealand
 * Almost near half (~47%) the respondents said they belong to the student category
 * ~82% identified themselves as male, ~6% as female and ~12% as non-binary

Motivations
Nearly half of the respondents said that they were encouraged to contribute code to Wikimedia projects by someone who they knew and while attending a Wikimedia workshop. Remaining half mentioned that working on their first contribution for Wikimedia was a result of self-discovery.

Challenges

 * Some generic challenges that new developers face around Wikimedia infrastructure are: understanding the codebase, Gerrit and the code review process, and running into errors while setting up the development environment. Other specific issues that were mentioned:
 * Trouble filtering issues in Phabricator to find something to work on because most issues appear to be missing lot of information.
 * Our codebase is in English, and it is a second language for some developers.
 * The documentation on Wikitech is not so clear about how to create an account and how to create a new project on Toolforge.
 * It isn't obvious to a developer that their patch set will be uploaded to Gerrit for code-review and not Github.
 * 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
~60% (n=14) respondents said they are likely to recommend Wikimedia for code contribution to friends and colleagues. ~82% (n=14) respondents said they are satisfied with their experience contributing to Wikimedia.

Suggestions for improvement
Here are some suggestions made by new developers (responses below have been only slightly edited): Add a section on contributors who left >
 * Mentor support
 * Better documentation
 * Code reviews take a long time
 * Better exchange between volunteer and staff developers
 * It is not clear with certain projects (e.g. apps-android-wikipedia) that it's not the venue to begin contributing code to Wikimedia projects
 * Complicated database structure is only accessible on Labs