Learning to program is—for many practical, historical, as well as some vacuous reasons—a rite of passage in probably all computer science, informatics, software engineering, and computer engineering courses. For many decades, this skill would reliably set computing graduates apart from their peers in other disciplines. In this Viewpoint, I argue that in the 21stcentury programming proficiency on its own is neither representative of the skills that the marketplace requires from computing graduates, nor does it offer the strong vocational qualifications it once did. Accordingly, I propose that computing students should be encouraged to contribute code to open source software projects through their curricular activities. I have been practicing and honing this approach for more than 15 years in a software engineering course where open source contributions are an assessed compulsory requirement.2 Based on this experience, I explain why the ability to make such contributions is the modern generalization of coding skills acquisition, outline what students can learn from such activities, describe how an open source contribution exercise is embedded in the course, and conclude with practices that have underpinned the assignment’s success.
Contributing Is the New Coding
Programming skills nowadays are only a part of what a software developer should know. This is the case for two reasons. First, practices have advanced well beyond the chief programmer/surgeon model popularized by Fred Brooks in the 1970s,1to include work on orders of magnitude larger systems, advanced tooling, pervasive process automation, as well as sophisticated teamwork, workflows, and management. Second, industrial best practices have homogenized with those followed by large and successful open source software projects. Businesses have assimilated and contributed many open source development practices. This has made the corresponding knowledge and skills portable between volunteer projects and enterprise ones.
Consequently, instruction must move from a course’s educational laboratory to an organizational setting. By contributing to open source projects, students acquire in practice a formidable range of skills, knowledge, and experiences, allowing them to work productively as modern well-rounded developers rather than as the lone-wolf coders portrayed by Hollywood. The most difficult skills to acquire in a traditional programming assignment are the following social and organizational skills.