Attracting and retaining a steady stream of new contributors is crucial to ensuring the long-term survival of open-source software (OSS) projects. However, there are two key research gaps regarding recommendations for onboarding new contributors to OSS projects. First, most of the existing recommendations are based on a limited number of projects, which raises concerns about their generalizability. If a recommendation yields conflicting results in a different context, it could hinder a newcomer's onboarding process rather than help them. Second, it's unclear whether these recommendations also apply to experienced contributors. If certain recommendations are specific to newcomers, continuing to follow them after their initial contributions are accepted could hinder their chances of becoming long-term contributors. To address these gaps, we conducted a two-stage mixed-method study. In the first stage, we conducted a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) and identified 15 task-related actionable recommendations that newcomers to OSS projects can follow to improve their odds of successful onboarding. In the second stage, we conduct a large-scale empirical study of five Gerrit-based projects and 1,155 OSS projects from GitHub to assess whether those recommendations assist newcomers' successful onboarding. Our results suggest that four recommendations positively correlate with newcomers' first patch acceptance in most contexts. Four recommendations are context-dependent, and four indicate significant negative associations for most projects. Our results also found three newcomer-specific recommendations, which OSS joiners should abandon at non-newcomer status to increase their odds of becoming long-term contributors.

翻译：吸引并持续保留新贡献者对于确保开源软件项目的长期生存至关重要。然而，关于开源项目新手入门推荐的研究存在两个关键空白。首先，现有推荐大多基于有限数量的项目，这引发了对其普适性的担忧。若某项推荐在不同情境下产生矛盾结果，反而可能阻碍而非帮助新手的入门过程。其次，尚不清楚这些推荐是否同样适用于经验丰富的贡献者。若某些推荐仅针对新手，在其初始贡献被接受后继续遵循这些建议，反而可能阻碍他们成为长期贡献者。为填补这些空白，我们开展了一项两阶段混合方法研究。在第一阶段，我们通过系统文献综述识别出15项与任务相关的可操作性推荐，开源项目新手可遵循这些建议以提高成功入门的概率。在第二阶段，我们对5个基于Gerrit的项目及来自GitHub的1,155个开源项目进行了大规模实证研究，以评估这些推荐是否有助于新手成功入门。研究结果表明：四项推荐在多数情境下与新手的首次补丁接受呈正相关；四项推荐具有情境依赖性；另有四项推荐在多数项目中呈现显著负相关。我们还发现三项针对新手的特异性推荐，开源参与者在脱离新手身份后应停止遵循这些建议，以增加成为长期贡献者的概率。