Identification and Mitigation of Toxic Communications Among Open Source Software Developers

Abstract

Toxic and unhealthy conversations during the developer’s communication may reduce the professional harmony and productivity of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects. For example, toxic code review comments may raise pushback from an author to complete suggested changes. A toxic communication with another person may hamper future communication and collaboration. Research also suggests that toxicity disproportionately impacts newcomers, women, and other participants from marginalized groups. Therefore, toxicity is a barrier to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. Since the occurrence of toxic communications is not uncommon among FOSS communities and such communications may have serious repercussions, the primary objective of my proposed dissertation is to automatically identify and mitigate toxicity during developers’ textual interactions. On this goal, I aim to: i) build an automated toxicity detector for Software Engineering (SE) domain, ii) identify the notion of toxicity across demographics, and iii) analyze the impacts of toxicity on the outcomes of Open Source Software (OSS) projects.