Collaborative software development happens in teams, that cooperate on shared artefacts, and discuss development on online platforms. Due to the complexity of development and the variety of teams, software components often act as effective containers for parallel work and teams. Past research has shown how communication between team members, especially in an open-source environment, can become extremely toxic, and lead to members leaving the development team. This has a direct effect on the evolution and maintenance of the project in which the former members were active in. The purpose of our study is two-fold: first, we propose an approach to evaluate, at a finer granularity, the positive and negative emotions in the communication between developers; and second, we aim to characterise a project's development paths, or components, as more or less impacted by the emotions. Our analysis evaluates single sentences rather than whole messages as the finest granularity of communication. The previous study found that the high positivity or negativity at the sentence level may indirectly impact the writer him/herself, or the reader. In this way, we could highlight specific paths of Gentoo as the most affected by negative emotions, and show how negative emotions have evolved and changed along the same paths. By joining the analysis of the mailing lists, from which we derive the sentiment of the developers, with the information derived from the development logs, we obtained a longitudinal picture of how development paths have been historically affected by positive or negative emotions. Our study shows that, in recent years, negative emotions have generally decreased in the communication between Gentoo developers. We also show how file paths, as collaborative software development artefacts, were more or less impacted by the emotions of the developers.

翻译：协作式软件开发通常在团队中进行，团队成员围绕共享制品展开合作，并在在线平台上讨论开发事宜。由于开发过程的复杂性及团队的多样性，软件组件常作为并行工作和团队协作的有效载体。既往研究表明，团队成员间的交流（尤其在开源环境中）可能变得极具毒性，并导致成员退出开发团队。这对前成员曾活跃参与项目的演进与维护产生直接影响。本研究目的有二：首先，我们提出一种以更细粒度评估开发者交流中积极与消极情感的方法；其次，我们旨在将项目的开发路径（即组件）特征化为受情感影响程度不同的实体。我们的分析以单句而非整条消息作为最细粒度的交流单元进行评估。先前研究发现，句子层面的高积极性或消极性可能间接影响写作者自身或读者。通过这种方法，我们能够识别出Gentoo中受消极情感影响最显著的具体路径，并展示消极情感如何沿相同路径演化变迁。通过将邮件列表的情感分析（从中推导开发者情感）与开发日志信息相结合，我们获得了开发路径受积极或消极情感历史影响的纵向图景。研究表明，近年来Gentoo开发者交流中的消极情感整体呈下降趋势。我们还揭示了作为协作软件开发制品的文件路径如何不同程度地受到开发者情感的影响。