Research has revealed that significant barriers exist when entering Open-Source Software (OSS) communities and that women disproportionately experience such barriers. However, this research has focused mainly on social/cultural factors, ignoring the environment itself — the tools and infrastructure. To shed some light onto how tools and infrastructure might somehow factor into OSS barriers to entry, we conducted a field study with five teams of software professionals, who worked through five use-cases to analyze the tools and infrastructure used in their OSS projects. These software professionals found tool/infrastructure barriers in 7% to 71% of the use-case steps that they analyzed, most of which are tied to newcomer barriers that have been established in the literature. Further, over 80% of the barrier types they found include attributes that are biased against women.
Nick Bradley University of British Columbia, Thomas Fritz University of Zurich, University of British Columbia, Reid Holmes University of British Columbia