Predicting developers' negative feelings about code review

Egelman, Carolyn D.; Murphy-Hill, Emerson; Kammer, Elizabeth; Hodges, Margaret Morrow; Green, Collin; Jaspan, Ciera; Lin, James

doi:10.1145/3377811.3380414

Cited by 33 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 22 publications

(25 reference statements)

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“…This was also mentioned in our case study, in which participants said that contributors might escalate the problem if nobody recedes. Even when maintainers reinforced their standpoint or tried to stop the incivility, the tone in which the feedback is delivered can cause unnecessarily interpersonal conflicts [19].…”

Section: Discussion On the Main Findingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Previous work have found that interpersonal conflicts and toxicity are rare on Google's code review discussions and on GitHub projects with "too heated" conversations [19,53], but they have negative consequences when they occur.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Focusing on the effectiveness of conflict management strategies, Huang et al [32] found that only the strategy of providing concrete constructive suggestions for alternative suggestions at the technical level was effective in reducing the negative consequences of conflicts, while neither rational clarifications of misunderstandings nor social encouragement were effective. Most recently, Egelman et al [19] identified five types of feelings (e.g., frustration and discouragement) that were results of "unnecessary interpersonal conflict" in code review at Google. They further developed a method that uses metrics in the code review process (i.e., rounds of review, review time, and shepherding time) to predict these feelings.…”

Section: Incivilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Many studies have investigated the technical aspects of code review, such as the kinds of patches that are more likely to be accepted [36], the reasons why patches are rejected [67], the characteristics of the reviewing history in mailing lists [37], and the techniques for recommending appropriate reviewers for patches [35]. The social aspects of code review discussions, however, are only explored in a few very recent studies [10,19], often not directly leveraging the construct of incivility.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, Egelman et al [19] have found that unnecessary interpersonal conflicts in code review can evoke negative feelings, such as frustration and discouragement, in developers.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 4 more Smart Citations

The "Shut the f**k up" Phenomenon: Characterizing Incivility in Open Source Code Review Discussions

Ferreira,

Cheng,

Adams

2021

Preprint

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Code review is an important quality assurance activity for software development. Code review discussions among developers and maintainers can be heated and sometimes involve personal attacks and unnecessary disrespectful comments, demonstrating, therefore, incivility. Although incivility in public discussions has received increasing attention from researchers in different domains, the knowledge about the characteristics, causes, and consequences of uncivil communication is still very limited in the context of software development, and more specifically, code review. To address this gap in the literature, we leverage the mature social construct of incivility as a lens to understand confrontational conflicts in open source code review discussions. For that, we conducted a qualitative analysis on 1,545 emails from the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML) that were associated with rejected changes. We found that more than half (66.66%) of the non-technical emails included uncivil features. Particularly, frustration, name calling, and impatience are the most frequent features in uncivil emails. We also found that there are civil alternatives to address arguments, while uncivil comments can potentially be made by any people when discussing any topic. Finally, we identified various causes and consequences of such uncivil communication. Our work serves as the first study about the phenomenon of in(civility) in open source software development, paving the road for a new field of research about collaboration and communication in the context of software engineering activities. CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing; • Software and its engineering → Open source model.

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Section: Discussion On the Main Findingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Incivilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, Egelman et al [19] have found that unnecessary interpersonal conflicts in code review can evoke negative feelings, such as frustration and discouragement, in developers.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

The "Shut the f**k up" Phenomenon: Characterizing Incivility in Open Source Code Review Discussions

Ferreira,

Cheng,

Adams

2021

Preprint

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Are Code Review Smells and Metrics Useful in Pull Request-Level Software Defect Prediction?

Baciejowski¹,

Garbala²,

Zmijewski³

et al. 2023

Studies in Systems, Decision and Control

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A mixed-methods analysis of micro-collaborative coding practices in OpenStack

et al. 2022

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Technical collaboration between multiple contributors is a natural phenomenon in distributed open source software development projects. Macro-collaboration, where each code commit is attributed to a single collaborator, has been extensively studied in the research literature. This is much less the case for so-called micro-collaboration practices, in which multiple authors contribute to the same commit. To support such practices, GitLab and GitHub started supporting social coding mechanisms such as the “Co-Authored-By:” trailers in commit messages, which, in turn, enable to empirically study such micro-collaboration. In order to understand the mechanisms, benefits and limitations of micro-collaboration, this article provides an exemplar case study of collaboration practices in the OpenStack ecosystem. Following a mixed-method research approach we provide qualitative evidence through a thematic and content analysis of semi-structured interviews with 16 OpenStack contributors. We contrast their perception with quantitative evidence gained by statistical analysis of the git commit histories ( 1M commits) and Gerrit code review histories ( 631K change sets and 2M patch sets) of 1,804 OpenStack project repositories over a 9-year period. Our findings provide novel empirical insights to practitioners to promote micro-collaborative coding practices, and to academics to conduct further research towards understanding and automating the micro-collaboration process.

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Predicting developers' negative feelings about code review

Cited by 33 publications

References 22 publications

The "Shut the f**k up" Phenomenon: Characterizing Incivility in Open Source Code Review Discussions

The "Shut the f**k up" Phenomenon: Characterizing Incivility in Open Source Code Review Discussions

Are Code Review Smells and Metrics Useful in Pull Request-Level Software Defect Prediction?

A mixed-methods analysis of micro-collaborative coding practices in OpenStack

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