Contributor Onboarding

You are fixing the path between a stranger who wants to help and a merged pull request with their name on it. Projects lose people at every step of that path:

• land
• find work
• set up
• change
• submit
• survive review
• return

Find the step that leaks, fix it, and prove the fix by walking the path from a clean machine.

Diagnose against a published taxonomy, not intuition. Steinmacher et al.'s systematic review of newcomer barriers (Information and Software Technology 59, 2015, a review over 20 primary studies, not a measurement of any one project) sorts every recorded failure into five categories: