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The software industry lacks gender diversity. Recent research has suggested that a toxic working culture is to blame. Studies have found that communications in software repositories directed towards women are more negative in general. In this study, we use a destructive criticism lens to examine gender differences in software code review feedback. Software code review is a practice where code is peer reviewed and negative feedback is often delivered. We explore differences in perceptions, frequency, and impact of destructive criticism across genders. We surveyed 93 software practitioners eliciting perceived reactions to hypothetical scenarios (or vignettes) where participants are asked to imagine receiving either constructive or destructive criticism. In addition, the survey collected general opinions on feedback obtained during software code review as well as the frequency that participants give and receive destructive criticism. We found that opinions on destructive criticism vary. Women perceive destructive criticism as less appropriate and are less motivated to continue working with the developer after receiving destructive criticism. Destructive criticism is fairly common with more than half of respondents having received nonspecific negative feedback and nearly a quarter having received inconsiderate negative feedback in the past year. Our results suggest that destructive criticism in code review could be a contributing factor to the lack of gender diversity observed in the software industry.

User feedback on software products has been shown to be useful for development and can be exceedingly abundant online. Many approaches have been developed to elicit requirements in different ways from this large volume of feedback, including the use of unsupervised clustering, underpinned by text embeddings. Methods for embedding text can vary significantly within the literature, highlighting the lack of a consensus as to which approaches are best able to cluster user feedback into requirements relevant groups. This work proposes a methodology for comparing text embeddings of user feedback using existing labelled datasets. Using 7 diverse datasets from the literature, we apply this methodology to evaluate both established text embedding techniques from the user feedback analysis literature (including topic modelling and word embeddings) as well as text embeddings from state of the art deep text embedding models. Results demonstrate that text embeddings produced by state of the art models, most notably the Universal Sentence Encoder (USE), group feedback with similar requirements relevant characteristics together better than other evaluated techniques across all seven datasets. These results can help researchers select appropriate embedding techniques when developing future unsupervised clustering approaches within user feedback analysis.

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