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Despite the growing success of open-source software ecosystems (SECOs), their sustainability depends on the recruitment and involvement of ever-larger contributors. As such, onboarding, i.e., the socio-technical adaptation of new contributors to a SECO, forms a significant aspect of a SECO's growth that requires substantial resources. Unfortunately, despite theoretical models and initial user studies to examine the potential benefits of onboarding, little is known about the process of SECO onboarding, nor about the socio-technical benefits and drawbacks of contributors' onboarding experience in a SECO. To address these, we first carry out an observational study of 72 new contributors during an OpenStack onboarding event to provide a catalog of teaching content, teaching strategies, onboarding challenges, and expected benefits. Next, we empirically validate the extent to which diversity, productivity, and quality benefits are achieved by mining code changes, reviews, and contributors' issues with(out) OpenStack onboarding experience. Among other findings, our study shows a significant correlation with increasing gender diversity (65% for both females and non-binary contributors) and patch acceptance rates (13.5%). Onboarding also has a significant negative correlation with the time until a contributor's first commit and bug-proneness of contributions.

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Technical collaboration between multiple contributors is a natural phenomenon in distributed open source software development projects. Macro-collaboration, where each code commit is attributed to a single collaborator, has been extensively studied in the research literature. This is much less the case for so-called micro-collaboration practices, in which multiple authors contribute to the same commit. To support such practices, GitLab and GitHub started supporting social coding mechanisms such as the “Co-Authored-By:” trailers in commit messages, which, in turn, enable to empirically study such micro-collaboration. In order to understand the mechanisms, benefits and limitations of micro-collaboration, this article provides an exemplar case study of collaboration practices in the OpenStack ecosystem. Following a mixed-method research approach we provide qualitative evidence through a thematic and content analysis of semi-structured interviews with 16 OpenStack contributors. We contrast their perception with quantitative evidence gained by statistical analysis of the git commit histories ( 1M commits) and Gerrit code review histories ( 631K change sets and 2M patch sets) of 1,804 OpenStack project repositories over a 9-year period. Our findings provide novel empirical insights to practitioners to promote micro-collaborative coding practices, and to academics to conduct further research towards understanding and automating the micro-collaboration process.