The "Shut the f**k up" Phenomenon: Characterizing Incivility in Open Source Code Review Discussions

TL;DR

This study analyzes incivility in open source code review discussions, revealing that over half of non-technical emails contain uncivil features like frustration and name calling, impacting collaboration.

Contribution

First qualitative analysis of incivility in open source code review, identifying causes, features, and potential civil alternatives in developer communications.

Findings

66.66% of non-technical emails are uncivil

Frustration, name calling, and impatience are common features

Uncivil comments can be made by anyone in discussions

Abstract

Code review is an important quality assurance activity for software development. 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 knowledge about the characteristics, causes, and consequences of uncivil communication is still very limited in the context of software development, and more specifically, code review. To address this gap in the literature, we leverage the mature social construct of incivility as a lens to understand confrontational conflicts in open source code review discussions. For that, we conducted a qualitative analysis on 1,545 emails from the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML) that were associated with rejected changes. We found that more than half 66.66% of the non-technical emails included uncivil features. Particularly, frustration, name calling, and impatience are the most frequent features in uncivil emails. We also found that there are civil alternatives to address arguments, while uncivil comments can potentially be made by any people when discussing any topic. Finally, we identified various causes and consequences of such uncivil communication. Our work serves as the first study about the phenomenon of in(civility) in open source software development, paving the road for a new field of research about collaboration and communication in the context of software engineering activities.