Emoji Promotes Developer Participation and Issue Resolution on GitHub

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhou, Yuhang, Lu, Xuan, Gao, Ge, Mei, Qiaozhu, Ai, Wei
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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_version_ 1866913316327129088
author Zhou, Yuhang
Lu, Xuan
Gao, Ge
Mei, Qiaozhu
Ai, Wei
author_facet Zhou, Yuhang
Lu, Xuan
Gao, Ge
Mei, Qiaozhu
Ai, Wei
contents Although remote working is increasingly adopted during the pandemic, many are concerned by the low-efficiency in the remote working. Missing in text-based communication are non-verbal cues such as facial expressions and body language, which hinders the effective communication and negatively impacts the work outcomes. Prevalent on social media platforms, emojis, as alternative non-verbal cues, are gaining popularity in the virtual workspaces well. In this paper, we study how emoji usage influences developer participation and issue resolution in virtual workspaces. To this end, we collect GitHub issues for a one-year period and apply causal inference techniques to measure the causal effect of emojis on the outcome of issues, controlling for confounders such as issue content, repository, and author information. We find that emojis can significantly reduce the resolution time of issues and attract more user participation. We also compare the heterogeneous effect on different types of issues. These findings deepen our understanding of the developer communities, and they provide design implications on how to facilitate interactions and broaden developer participation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2308_16360
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Emoji Promotes Developer Participation and Issue Resolution on GitHub
Zhou, Yuhang
Lu, Xuan
Gao, Ge
Mei, Qiaozhu
Ai, Wei
Computers and Society
Human-Computer Interaction
Machine Learning
Although remote working is increasingly adopted during the pandemic, many are concerned by the low-efficiency in the remote working. Missing in text-based communication are non-verbal cues such as facial expressions and body language, which hinders the effective communication and negatively impacts the work outcomes. Prevalent on social media platforms, emojis, as alternative non-verbal cues, are gaining popularity in the virtual workspaces well. In this paper, we study how emoji usage influences developer participation and issue resolution in virtual workspaces. To this end, we collect GitHub issues for a one-year period and apply causal inference techniques to measure the causal effect of emojis on the outcome of issues, controlling for confounders such as issue content, repository, and author information. We find that emojis can significantly reduce the resolution time of issues and attract more user participation. We also compare the heterogeneous effect on different types of issues. These findings deepen our understanding of the developer communities, and they provide design implications on how to facilitate interactions and broaden developer participation.
title Emoji Promotes Developer Participation and Issue Resolution on GitHub
topic Computers and Society
Human-Computer Interaction
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.16360