Showing Our Work: A Study In Understanding Open Source Contributors

In 2022, the research team within Google’s Open Source Programs Office launched an in-depth study to better understand open source developers, contributors, and maintainers. Since Alphabet is a large consumer of and contributor to open source, our primary goals were to investigate the evolving needs and motivations of open source contributors, and to learn how we can best support the communities we depend on. We also wanted to share our findings with the community in order to further research efforts and our collective understanding of open source work.

Key findings from this work suggest that community leaders should:

• Value your time together and apart: Lack of time was cited as the leading reason ‘not to contribute’ as well as motivation to ‘leave a community’. This should encourage community leaders to adopt practices that ensure that they are making the most of the time they have together. One example: some projects have planned breaks, no-meeting weeks, or official slowdowns during holidays or popular conference weeks.

• Invest in documentation: Contributors and maintainers expressed that task variety, delegation, and onboarding new maintainers could help to reduce burnout in open source. Documentation is one way to make individual knowledge accessible to the community. In addition to technical and procedural overviews, documentation can also be used to clarify roles, tasks, expectations, and a path to leadership.

• Always communicate with care: Contributors prefer projects that have welcoming communities, clear onboarding paths, and a code of conduct. Communication is the primary way for community leaders to promote welcoming and inclusive communities and set norms around language and behavior (as documented in a Code of Conduct). Communication is also how we build relationships, trust, and respect for each other.
  
  
• Create spaces for anonymous feedback: Variable answers between demographic subsets in our research suggest that while systematic approaches can be taken to reduce burnout, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Feedback is a valuable tool for any project to adjust to the evolving needs of their contributor and user communities. When designed appropriately, surveys can serve as safe, anonymous, retaliation-free spaces for individuals to provide honest feedback.

How do contributors select projects?

Base: 517 international OSS developers, contributors, maintainers and students who worked on open source in their personal time

Within Google’s Open Source Programs office, we are constantly looking for ways to improve support for contributors inside and outside of Google. Studies such as this one provide guidance to our programs and investments in the community. This work helps us to see we should continue to:

• Invest in documentation competency: Google Season of Docs provides support for open source projects to improve their documentation and gives professional technical writers an opportunity to gain experience in open source.

• Document roles and promote tactics that recognize work within communities: The ACROSS project continues to work with projects and communities to establish consistent language to define roles, responsibilities, and work done within open source projects.

• Exercise and discuss ‘better’ practices within the community: While we continually seek to improve our engagement practices within communities, we will also continue to share these experiences with the broader community in hopes that we can all learn from our successes and challenges. For example, we’ve published documentation around our release process, including resources for the creation and management of a code of conduct.

This research, along with other articles authored by the OSPO research team is now available on our site.

By Sophia Vargas – Researcher, Google Open Source Programs Office

GSoC 2023: project results and feedback part 1

In 2023, Google Summer of Code brought 966 new contributors into open source software development to work with open source organizations on a 12+ week project. We had 168 participating open source organizations with mentors and contributors from over 75 countries this year.

For 19 years, Google Summer of Code has thrived due to the enthusiasm of our open source communities and the 19k+ volunteer mentors that spend from 50-150 hours mentoring each of our 20k contributors since 2005! This year, there are 168 mentoring organizations and over 1,950 mentors participating in the 2023 program. A sincere thank you to our mentors and organization administrators for guiding and supporting our contributors this year. We are also looking forward to hosting many of the 2023 GSoC Mentors on campus this fall for the annual Mentor Summit.

September 4th concluded the standard 12-week project timeline and we are pleased to announce that 628 contributors have successfully completed this year’s program as of today, September 5th, 2023. Congratulations to all the contributors and mentors that have wrapped up their summer coding projects!

2023 has shown us that GSoC continues to grow in popularity with students and developers 19 years after the program began. GSoC had a record high 5,679 contributor applicants from 106 countries submit their project proposals this year. We also had huge interest in the program with over 43,765 registrants from 160 countries applying to the program during the two week application period.

The final step of every GSoC program is to hear back from mentors and contributors on their experiences through evaluations. This helps GSoC Admins continuously improve the program and gives us a chance to see the impact the program has on so many individuals! Some notable results and comments from the standard 12-week project length evaluations are below:

• 95.63% of contributors think that GSoC helped their programming skills
• 99.06% of contributors would recommend their GSoC mentors
• 97.81% of contributors will continue working with their GSoC organization
• 99.84% of contributors plan to continue working on open source
• 82.81% of contributors said they would consider being a mentor
• 96.25% of contributors said they would apply to GSoC again

Here’s some of what our GSoC 2023 Contributors had to say about the program!

At the suggestion of last year’s contributors, we added multiple live talks throughout the coding period to bring contributors together, providing tips to help them make the most of their GSoC experience. Each of these talks were attended on average by 42% of the 2023 GSoC contributors.

Another request from our previous contributors was to hear more about the cool projects their colleagues did over the summer and the opportunity to talk about their own projects with others. Over the coming weeks we are hosting three lightning talk sessions where over 40 of the 2023 contributors will have the opportunity to present their project learnings to the other contributors and their mentors.

We’ll be back in a couple of months to give a final update on the GSoC projects that will conclude later this year. Almost 30% of contributors (286 contributors) are still completing their projects, so please stay tuned for their results in part two of this blog post later this year!

By Perry Burnham – Google Open Source

ChromeOS EC testing suite in Renode for consumer products

Besides main application cores that are directly exposed to the users, many industrial and consumer devices include embedded controllers, which, although fairly invisible to the user, perform critical system tasks such as power management, receiving and processing user input, or signals from sensors like thermal. Given their role in the system, those MCUs need to be rigorously tested in CI. This is why the ChromeOS team has collaborated with Antmicro to simulate the ChromeOS FPMCU (Fingerprint Firmware) module, based on the ChromeOS EC (Embedded Controller) firmware in Antmicro’s Renode open source simulation framework.

This enables automated testing of embedded controllers in CI at scale, in a deterministic manner, and with complete observability. It also streamlines the developer feedback loop for faster development of microcontroller firmware that ChromeOS uses to drive peripherals, such as fingerprint readers or touchpads. To make this possible, we have improved the simulation capabilities for two of the microcontrollers used in FPMCU modules, popular in consumer electronics like Chromebooks and wearables, but also in many industrial applications: STM32F412 and STM32H743.

Testing consumer-grade products with Renode

Continuous testing for embedded systems

The project required implementing continuous testing of the FPMCU module against tens of binaries that test the controller in the most common operations and scenarios to ensure maximum reliability at all times. A traditional approach would require reflashing the physical microcontroller memory with each binary, which is time-consuming and error-prone. To scratch that itch we developed the CrOS EC Tester, which runs all EC tests in a Renode simulation and uses GitHub Actions to handle building and executing test binaries for a truly automated workflow—useful both in CI and in an interactive development environment.

Renode has broad support for architectures such as (but not limited to) RISC-V, ARM Cortex-M, (recently added) Cortex-R or Cortex-A, and runs binary-compatible software. Thus, it is not limited to testing embedded controllers but entire multi-CPU systems. You can easily add Renode to an existing workflow without any major changes for testing in real-life scenarios. By moving all testing efforts into an interactive and deterministic environment of Renode, you can implement a fully CI-driven testing approach in your projects and benefit from advanced debugging, tracing, and prototyping capabilities.

Comprehensive simulation of STM32 microcontrollers

The Renode models of the STM32F412 and STM32H743 microcontrollers give you access to a broad range of peripherals, allowing you to run various scenarios you’d typically test on hardware. As a result of our collaboration with Google, we have added or improved models of ST peripherals like UART, EXTI, GPIO, DMA, ADC, SPI, flash controllers, timers, watchdogs, and more.

The need for in-depth testing has led to the introduction of many enhancements to ARM Cortex-M support in general, such as the MPU (Memory Protection Unit), which allows you to protect certain memory areas from unauthorized modification or access or FPU interrupts. These features can now be used by other Cortex-M-based projects to further extend their test coverage with Renode.

Renode for rapid, interactive prototyping

One of the tests from our test suite used the microcontroller's MPU module to test address space security. When you run the test-rollback test case, you can see that the MPU simulated in Renode successfully protected the OS from unauthorized memory access:

Testing consumer-grade products with Renode

Another Renode feature that allowed us to increase our test coverage of the EC ecosystem is support for dummy SPI and I2C devices. While Renode supports a recently added advanced framework for time-controlled feeding of sensor data, many scenarios require much simpler interaction with the external device. For this purpose, we developed a dummy SPI device that simply returns pre-programmed data to the controller, which allowed us to pass initialization tests for a sensor without modeling the sensor itself. From the functional point of view of the simulation, the dummy sensor data is identical to the real data, which is useful when the specific component is difficult to model or lacks documentation.

Build a CI-driven test workflow with Renode

Renode is a powerful tool for automating and simplifying the test workflow in the project at any stage of development, even pre-silicon. It helps you reduce the tedium typically associated with embedded software testing by providing a fully controllable environment that can lead to fewer bugs and vulnerabilities, which is naturally important for mass-market products such as Chromebooks.

By Michael Gielda – Antmicro