Publisher：Empirical Software Engineering  

Open source software development has become more social and collaborative, evident GitHub. Since 2016, GitHub started to support more informal methods such as emoji reactions, with the goal to reduce commenting noise when reviewing any code changes to a repository. From a code review context, the extent to which emoji reactions facilitate a more efficient review process is unknown. We conduct an empirical study to mine 1,850 active repositories across seven popular languages to analyze 365,811 Pull Requests (PRs) for their emoji reactions against the review time, first-time contributors, comment intentions, and the consistency of the sentiments. Answering these four research perspectives, we first find that the number of emoji reactions has a significant correlation with the review time. Second, our results show that a PR submitted by a first-time contributor is less likely to receive emoji reactions. Third, the results reveal that the comments with an intention of information giving, are more likely to receive an emoji reaction. Fourth, we observe that only a small proportion of sentiments are not consistent between comments and emoji reactions, i.e., with 11.8% of instances being identified. In these cases, the prevalent reason is when reviewers cheer up authors that admit to a mistake, i.e., acknowledge a mistake. Apart from reducing commenting noise, our work suggests that emoji reactions play a positive role in facilitating collaborative communication during the review process.

DOI： 10.1007/s10664-023-10336-5

Web of Science

Scopus

Publisher：Proceedings - 2023 IEEE/ACM 20th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories, MSR 2023  

Images are increasingly being shared by software developers in diverse channels including question-and-answer forums like Stack Overflow. Although prior work has pointed out that these images are meaningful and provide complementary information compared to their associated text, how images are used to support questions is empirically unknown. To address this knowledge gap, in this paper we specifically conduct an empirical study to investigate (I) the characteristics of images, (II) the extent to which images are used in different question types, and (III) the role of images on receiving answers. Our results first show that user interface is the most common image content and undesired output is the most frequent purpose for sharing images. Moreover, these images essentially facilitate the understanding of 68% of sampled questions. Second, we find that discrepancy questions are more relatively frequent compared to those without images, but there are no significant differences observed in description length in all types of questions. Third, the quantitative results statistically validate that questions with images are more likely to receive accepted answers, but do not speed up the time to receive answers. Our work demonstrates the crucial role that images play by approaching the topic from a new angle and lays the foundation for future opportunities to use images to assist in tasks like generating questions and identifying question-relatedness.

DOI： 10.1109/MSR59073.2023.00059

Web of Science

Scopus