Beyond Textual Issues: Understanding the Usage and Impact of GitHub Reactions

Recently, GitHub introduced a new social feature, named reactions, which are pictorial characters similar to the emoji symbols widely used nowadays in text-based communications. Particularly, GitHub users can use a set of such symbols to react to issues and pull requests. However, little is known about the real usage and benefits of GitHub reactions. In this paper, we analyze the reactions provided by developers to more than 2.5 million issues and 9.7 million issue comments, in order to answer an extensive list of ten research questions about the usage and adoption of reactions. We show that reactions are being increasingly used by open-source developers. Moreover, we also found that issues with reactions usually take more time to be closed and have longer discussions. This dataset contains the data used in the paper "Beyond Textual Issues: Understanding the Usage and Impact of GitHub Reactions", accepted for SBES 2019.