Analysis of Newcomers Activity in Communicative Posts on GitHub

GitHub is a large platform that allows developers to host repositories with code and collaborate on various projects. With the development and expansion of open-source software (OSS) many researchers focused on various aspects of such open-source communities. Due to the availability of a wide range of projects, newcomers have an opportunity to be involved in ones that differ in terms of skills and experience required. However, new developers often face some barriers during the onboarding process. The aim of the current paper is to investigate relations towards newcomers through sentiment analysis of comments they receive in issues and pull requests in repositories of top-10 open source projects by contributor count and top-10 fastest growing open source projects based on The State of the Octoverse 2018 report by GitHub. By applying sentiment analysis we focus on differences between reactions to contributions of ‘old’ and ‘new’ developers, and find that while the majority of comments is rated as neutral, the amount of negativity is slightly higher for newcomers.

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