Mentoring is traditionally viewed as a dyadic, top-down apprenticeship. This perspective, however, overlooks other forms of informal mentoring taking place in everyday activities in which developers invest time and effort, but remain unacknowledged. Here, we investigate the different flavors of mentoring in Open Source Software (OSS) to define and identify implicit mentoring. We first define implicit mentoring--situations where contributors guide others through instructions and suggestions embedded in everyday (OSS) activities--through formative interviews with OSS contributors, a literature review, and member-checking. Next, through an empirical investigation of Pull Requests (PRs) in 37 Apache Projects, we build a classifier to extract implicit mentoring and characterize it through the dual lenses of experience and gender. Our analysis of 107,895 PRs shows that implicit mentoring occurs (27.41% of all PRs include implicit mentoring) and it does not follow the traditional dyadic, top-down apprenticeship model. When considering the gender of mentor-mentee pairs, we found pervasive homophily--a preference to mentor those who are of the same gender--in 93.81% cases. In the cross-gender mentoring instances, women were more likely to mentor men.

翻译：传统观念将指导视为一种二元、自上而下的学徒模式。然而，这种视角忽视了开发人员在日常活动中投入时间与精力却未获认可的其他非正式指导形式。本文通过研究开源软件中的多样化指导方式，对隐性指导进行定义与识别。首先，我们通过开源贡献者的形成性访谈、文献综述及成员核对，将隐性指导定义为贡献者通过嵌入日常活动中的指令和建议引导他人的情境。随后，通过对37个Apache项目的拉取请求进行实证研究，我们构建分类器提取隐性指导，并从经验与性别双重维度刻画其特征。对107,895个PR的分析表明：隐性指导确实存在（27.41%的PR包含隐性指导），且不遵循传统的二元、自上而下学徒模式。在考量指导者与被指导者性别配对时，我们发现了普遍的同伴效应——93.81%的案例呈现同性别指导偏好。在跨性别指导实例中，女性更倾向于指导男性。