Conference proceeding
Towards Understanding Emotions in Informal Developer Interactions: A Gitter Chat Study
Proceedings of the 31st ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, pp 2097-2101
30 Nov 2023
Abstract
Emotions play a significant role in teamwork and collaborative activities like software development. While researchers have analyzed developer emotions in various software artifacts (e.g., issues, pull requests), few studies have focused on understanding the broad spectrum of emotions expressed in chats. As one of the most widely used means of communication, chats contain valuable information in the form of informal conversations, such as negative perspectives about adopting a tool. In this paper, we present a dataset of developer chat messages manually annotated with a wide range of emotion labels (and sub-labels), and analyze the type of information present in those messages. We also investigate the unique signals of emotions specific to chats and distinguish them from other forms of software communication. Our findings suggest that chats have fewer expressions of Approval and Fear but more expressions of Curiosity compared to GitHub comments. We also notice that Confusion is frequently observed when discussing programming-related information such as unexpected software behavior. Overall, our study highlights the potential of mining emotions in developer chats for supporting software maintenance and evolution tools.
Metrics
Details
- Title
- Towards Understanding Emotions in Informal Developer Interactions: A Gitter Chat Study
- Creators
- Amirali Sajadi - Drexel University, Philadelphia, USAKostadin Damevski - Virginia Commonwealth UniversityPreetha Chatterjee - Drexel University
- Publication Details
- Proceedings of the 31st ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, pp 2097-2101
- Conference
- ESEC/FSE '23: 31st ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering
- Series
- ACM Conferences
- Publisher
- ACM
- Resource Type
- Conference proceeding
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Computer Science
- Web of Science ID
- WOS:001148157800178
- Scopus ID
- 2-s2.0-85180546866
- Other Identifier
- 991021883914004721
InCites Highlights
Data related to this publication, from InCites Benchmarking & Analytics tool:
- Collaboration types
- Domestic collaboration
- Web of Science research areas
- Computer Science, Software Engineering
- Computer Science, Theory & Methods