I'm usually following a few steps. But in general, you need to spend some time with the project to be able to contribute. 1. Start learning about the project f

I'm usually following a few steps. But in general, you need to spend some time with the project to be able to contribute. 1. Start learning about the project from user perspective. Try the most common use cases. Do tutorials, and read the documentation. 2. Download the code, build it, and run the project locally. 3. When you have the project running locally walk over the code of the most common use cases. To find the right code search for text from the UI, names of the API calls, or just add breakpoints at multiple places and see which one is hit. 4. Go over the code with the debugger and try to understand what's going on. 5. But don't spend a lot of time just aimlessly browsing the code. Only familiarize yourself a little with it and verify that your setup works, debugger is debugging, etc. 5. Choose some bug from an issue tracker and try to reproduce it locally. 6. Try to fix the bug.