Describing Software Developers Affectiveness through Markov chain Models

In this paper, we present an analysis of more than 500K comments from open-sourcerepositories of software systems.Our aim is to empirically determine how developers interact with each otherunder certain psychological conditions generated by politeness, sentiment andemotion expressed within developers' comments.Developers involved in an 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.

本研究针对软件系统开源代码仓库（open-source repository）中的超50万条评论展开分析，旨在通过实证方式探究开发者在评论中所表达的礼貌程度、情感倾向与情绪状态所催生的特定心理语境下的彼此互动模式。参与开源项目的开发者通常互不相识，主要通过邮件列表、聊天室及问题追踪系统（issue tracking system）等工具进行沟通。其沟通方式会对项目开发流程及参与人员的工作效率产生显著影响。本研究对开发者发布的评论的礼貌程度、情感倾向与情绪状态进行了量化评估，并对沟通流展开分析，以探究在存在不礼貌或负面评论时（反之亦然）开发者的互动规律。分析结果表明：当出现不礼貌或负面评论时，后续评论同样为不礼貌或负面评论的概率分别为14%与25%；而当评论带有愤怒情绪时，后续评论同样带有愤怒情绪的概率高达40%。鉴于社交因素会对开发者的工作效率造成严重影响，本研究结果可帮助项目管理者更好地掌控系统开发各阶段；在分布式开发环境中，该结论的参考价值尤为突出。