Whom are you going to call? determinants of @-mentions in Github discussions

Abstract

Open Source So ware (OSS) project success relies on crowd contributions. When an issue arises in pull-request based systems, @-mentions are used to call on people to task; previous studies have shown that @-mentions in discussions are associated with faster issue resolution. In most projects there may be many developers who could technically handle a variety of tasks. But OSS supports dynamic teams distributed across a wide variety of social and geographic backgrounds, as well as levels of involvement. It is, then, important to know whom to call on, i.e., who can be relied or trusted with important task-related duties, and why.In this paper, we sought to understand which observable sociotechnical a ributes of developers can be used to build good models of them being future @-mentioned in GitHub issues and pull request discussions. We built overall and project-speci c predictive models of future @-mentions, in order to capture the determinants of @-mentions in each of two hundred GitHub projects, and to understand if and how those determinants di er between projects. We found that visibility, expertise, and productivity are associated with an increase in @-mentions, while responsiveness is not, in the presence of a number of control variables. Also, we nd that though project-speci c di erences exist, the overall model can be used for cross-project prediction, indicating its GitHub-wide utility.

Recognizing Developers' Emotions while Programming

“…Similarly, the identi cation of negative emotions can indicate a stuck developer requiring support ful lling her information needs. Accordingly, an emotion-aware component integrated in the development environment can recommend relevant colleagues to consult on the code base [26] or trigger utilities for on-demand documentation generation [47].…”

Modern Code Reviews—Survey of Literature and Practice

“…We consolidated overlapping research objectives into single statements, i.e. the number of statements (46) < number of primary studies (149). All authors were responsible for creating the statements from the primary studies in SMS2018.…”

“…Using our mapping study (SMS2018), we formulated statements from the papers' research objective in the form of "It is important to investigate ... [research statement]. " We consolidated overlapping research objectives into single statements, i.e., the number of statements (46) < number of primary studies (149). All authors were responsible for creating the statements from the primary studies in SMS2018.…”

“…Another study investigated which socio-technical attributes of developers are able to predict @-mentions. It found that a developers visibility, expertise and productivity are associated with @-mentions, while, contrary to intuition, responsiveness is not [149]. Generalizing the idea of @-mentions, other researchers investigated to what information objects to stakeholders refer to in pull request discussions.…”