Detecting interpersonal conflict in issues and code review
Huilian Sophie Qiu, Bogdan Vasilescu, Christian Kästner, Carolyn Egelman, Ciera Jaspan, Emerson Murphy-Hill
Abstract
Interpersonal conflict in code review, such as toxic language or an unnecessary pushback, is associated with negative outcomes such as stress and turnover. Automatic detection is one approach to prevent and mitigate interpersonal conflict. Two recent automatic detection approaches were developed in different settings: a toxicity detector using text analytics for open source issue discussions and a pushback detector using logs-based metrics for corporate code reviews. This paper tests how the toxicity detector and the pushback detector can be generalized beyond their respective contexts and discussion types, and how the combination of the two can help improve interpersonal conflict detection. The results reveal connections between the two concepts.