Beyond Textual Issues: Understanding the Usage and Impact of GitHub Reactions

TL;DR

This study analyzes the usage and impact of GitHub reactions on issues and comments, revealing increasing adoption and their association with longer handling times and discussions.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale analysis of GitHub reactions, uncovering their usage patterns and effects on issue resolution and discussion length.

Findings

Reactions are increasingly used by developers.

Issues with reactions tend to take longer to resolve.

Reactions are associated with longer discussions.

Abstract

Recently, GitHub introduced a new social feature, named reactions, which are "pictorial characters" similar to emoji symbols widely used nowadays in text-based communications. Particularly, GitHub users can use a pre-defined set of such symbols to react to issues and pull requests. However, little is known about the real usage and impact of GitHub reactions. In this paper, we analyze the reactions provided by developers to more than 2.5 million issues and 9.7 million issue comments, in order to answer an extensive list of nine research questions about the usage and adoption of reactions. We show that reactions are being increasingly used by open source developers. Moreover, we also found that issues with reactions usually take more time to be handled and have longer discussions.