Detecting Emotional Contagion in Collaborative Software Development

Abstract

In this paper, a method is presented to detect emotional contagion in collaborative software development where such collaboration happens through online means, and more specifically GitHub. The method is based on a previously published framework to classify interactions among software developers in open source software collaborations. This paper builds on that framework to provide a method that can effectively detect and classify the extent to which emotional contagion appears to be present in a specific development effort. The method is general and can be applied to any development that uses GitHub as primary means of communication. By using a popular open source software project, this paper shows that within the selected scope it is possible to detect emotional contagion. The validity of the result is confined to each project, as a generalization of this analysis is beyond the scope of the paper, but is described as future research.