Sustaining Open Source Communities by Understanding the Influence of Discursive Manifestations on Sentiment
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Sustaining Open Source Communities by Understanding the Influence of Discursive Manifestations on Sentiment Denis Dennehy 1 & Kieran Conboy 1 & Jennifer Ferreira 2 & Jaganath Babu 1
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Sustaining open source (OS) communities is fundamental to the long-term success of any open source software (OSS) project. An OSS project consists of a community of software developers who are part of a larger business ecosystem involving hardware and software companies. Peer review of software code, known as patch review comments, is an important quality assurance activity for OSS development that requires developers to provide feedback concerning their degree of satisfaction. Despite the importance of feedback, which can affect sentiment of OS communities, the underlying discourse has not been studied. In this study, we use Activity Theory to identify and categorise 20,651 discursive manifestations of contradictions that occurred in patch review comments of a large, evolving OS community. Unique community-specific expressions are identified and mapped to developers’ sentiment during a software release cycle. The study contributes new insights concerning discursive manifestations of contradictions as a driving force for sustaining OS communities. Keywords Activity theory . Contradictions . Sentiment analysis . Open source . Patch reviews
1 Introduction Sustainability, an influential factor to creating competitive advantage (Berns et al. 2009; Hertel and Weisent 2013; Pappas et al. 2018) can be defined as the triple bottom line of economic, social, and environmental performance (Porter and Kramer 2006). To achieve this bottom line, companies will need to become ‘sustainability-oriented’ (Perrini and Tencati 2006), by (i) being aware of its responsibilities to various stakeholder groups, (ii) actively improving its ecological performance, (iii) contributing to sustainable social changes, (iv) and delivering value for society (Bednar and Welch 2020, Popovič et al. 2018, Pappas et al. 2018, Klievink et al. 2017). In this study, we focus on the sustainability of OS communities as it is fundamental to the long-term success and sustainability of any OS project (Gamalielsson and Lundell 2014).
* Denis Dennehy [email protected] 1
National University of Ireland Galway, Galway, Ireland
2
Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand
Sustainability in OSS projects largely depends on OSS developers maintaining healthy relationships with their peers in order to ensure their input and support (Ozer and Vogel 2015). Sustainability of OS projects largely depends on active, voluntary engagement from the OS community (Ho and Rai 2017; Germonprez et al. 2017; Xie and Matusiak 2016). Yet, research has shown that while processes, tools, and governance are important in enabling effective OSS development, sustaining the OS community is the most challenging (Appleyard and Chesbrough 2017; Ho and Richardson 2013; Sholler et al. 2019; Shaikh and Vaast 2016
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