In this paper, we present an analysis of more than 500K comments from open-source repositories of software systems. Our aim is to empirically determine how developers interact with each other under certain psychological conditions generated by politeness, sentiment and emotion expressed in developers' comments. Developers involved in open-source projects do not usually know each other; they mainly communicate through mailing lists, chat rooms, and tools such as issue tracking systems. The way in which they communicate affects the development process and the productivity of the people involved in the project. We evaluated politeness, sentiment, and emotions of comments posted by developers and studied the communication flow to understand how they interacted in the presence of impolite and negative comments (and vice versa). Our analysis shows that when in presence of impolite or negative comments, the probability of the next comment being impolite or negative is 14 and 25 , respectively; anger, however, has a probability of 40 of being followed by a further anger comment. The result could help managers take control the development phases of a system since social aspects can seriously affect a developer's productivity. In a distributed environment this may have a particular resonance.
Several recent studies have demonstrated the importance and relationship of productivity and quality to human aspects associated with the software development process. studied the effect of politeness @cite_0 @cite_42 and emotions @cite_43 on the time required to fix any given issue. The authors demonstrated that emotions did have an effect on the issue fixing time. Namely, results showed that issue fixing time for polite issues was shorter than issue fixing time for impolite and mixed-issues (polite and impolite issues). If someone is asked to accomplish a task in a polite way, there is higher possibility for a relaxed collaboration and faster results. On the other hand, impolite requests can easily generate discomfort, stress and burnout, often negatively impacting the actual time taken to complete a given task. The study also showed that a positive correlation existed between the percentage of polite comments and Magnetism and Stickiness of a project (higher attractiveness) and that the percentage of polite comments over time was (for the majority of the projects in our corpus) seasonal and not random.
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The research presented in this paper was partly funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) of the UK under grant ref: EP M024083 1. A successful software project is the result of a complex process involving, above all, people. Developers are the key factors for the success of a software development process and the Agile philosophy is developer-centred. Developers are not merely executors of tasks, but actually the protagonists and core of the whole development process. This paper aims to investigate social aspects among developers working together and the appeal of a software project developed with the support of Agile tools such as Agile boards. We studied 14 open source software projects developed using the Agile board of the JIRA repository. We analysed all the comments committed by the developers involved in the projects and we studied whether the politeness of the comments affected the number of developers involved over the years and the time required to fix any given issue. Our results show that the level of politeness in the communication process among developers does have an effect on the time required to fix issues and, in the majority of the analysed projects, it has a positive correlation with attractiveness of the project to both active and potential developers. The more polite developers were, the less time it took to fix an issue, and, in the majority of the analysed cases, the more the developers wanted to be part of project, the more they were willing to continue working on the project over time.