research-article

A longitudinal study on the maintainers' sentiment of a large scale open source ecosystem

Authors:

Isabella Ferreira,

Bram AdamsAuthors Info & Claims

SEmotion '19: Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Emotion Awareness in Software Engineering

Pages 17 - 22

https://doi.org/10.1109/SEmotion.2019.00011

Published: 28 May 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Software development is a collaborative activity in which feelings and emotions can affect the developer's productivity, creativity, and contribution satisfaction. For example, the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML), which is used by subsystem maintainers to review patches sent by contributors, is known for its direct communication style, which is sometimes blamed as having a negative impact on contributors. In September 28, 2018, the kernel's lead maintainer, Linus Torvalds, announced that he would take a temporary break from the community, which led numerous members of the kernel community and observers from other communities to wonder to what extent this unexpected event could raise awareness about respectful interactions between community members. This paper performs an exploratory study in which we use an off-the-shelf sentiment mining tool to assess whether the maintainers' sentiment changed after Linus Torvalds' temporary break from his maintainer role. Based on the data available thus far, we did not find any high-level changes in maintainer sentiment. In future work, we will perform more fine-grained sentiment analysis.

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Cited By

Qiu HVasilescu BKästner CEgelman CJaspan CMurphy-Hill EBegel ABlincoe K(2022)Detecting interpersonal conflict in issues and code reviewProceedings of the 2022 ACM/IEEE 44th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Society10.1145/3510458.3513019(41-55)Online publication date: 21-May-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3510458.3513019
Lin BCassee NSerebrenik ABavota GNovielli NLanza M(2022)Opinion Mining for Software Development: A Systematic Literature ReviewACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/349038831:3(1-41)Online publication date: 7-Mar-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3490388
Ferreira ICheng JAdams B(2021)The "Shut the f**k up" Phenomenon: Characterizing Incivility in Open Source Code Review DiscussionsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/34794975:CSCW2(1-35)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3479497

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Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

SEmotion '19: Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Emotion Awareness in Software Engineering

May 2019

58 pages

Sponsors

SIGSOFT: ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering
IEEE-CS: Computer Society

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IEEE Press

Publication History

Published: 28 May 2019

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ICSE '19

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SIGSOFT
IEEE-CS

ICSE '19: 41st International Conference on Software Engineering

May 28, 2019

Quebec, Montreal, Canada

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ICSE 2025

2025 IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering

April 26 - May 3, 2025

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Cited By

Qiu HVasilescu BKästner CEgelman CJaspan CMurphy-Hill EBegel ABlincoe K(2022)Detecting interpersonal conflict in issues and code reviewProceedings of the 2022 ACM/IEEE 44th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Society10.1145/3510458.3513019(41-55)Online publication date: 21-May-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3510458.3513019
Lin BCassee NSerebrenik ABavota GNovielli NLanza M(2022)Opinion Mining for Software Development: A Systematic Literature ReviewACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/349038831:3(1-41)Online publication date: 7-Mar-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3490388
Ferreira ICheng JAdams B(2021)The "Shut the f**k up" Phenomenon: Characterizing Incivility in Open Source Code Review DiscussionsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/34794975:CSCW2(1-35)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3479497

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