Characterizing and detecting incivility in open source code review discussions | Isabella Ferreira
Channel: CHAOSS
Date: 11/12/2021

Characterizing and Detecting Incivility in Open Source Code Review Discussions

Code review is an important quality assurance activity for open source software development. Yet, code review discussions among developers and maintainers can be heated and sometimes involve personal attacks and unnecessary disrespectful comments, demonstrating, therefore, incivility. Although incivility in public discussions has received increasing attention from researchers in different domains, the understanding of this phenomenon is still very limited in the context of software development and, more specifically, code review. To address this gap, this proposed talk will present the results of a qualitative analysis conducted on 1,545 emails from the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML) that were associated with rejected changes. From this analysis, we identified the features of discussion of civil and uncivil communication as well as the causes and consequences of uncivil communication. Based on our results and with the goal to create healthier and more attractive open source communities, we will also discuss in this talk (i) approaches that could be used to address incivility before and after it happens, (ii) pitfalls to avoid when trying to automatically detect incivility, and (iii) heuristics for detecting incivility in code review discussions.