An empirical study of emoji use in software development communication

Abstract

Similar to social media platforms , people use emojis in software development related communication to enrich the context and convey additional emotion. With the increasing emoji use in software development-related communication, it has become important to understand why software developers are using emojis and their impact. Gaining a deeper understanding is essential because the intention of emoji usage might be affected by the demographics and experience of developers; also, frequency and the distribution of emoji usage might change depending on the activity, stage of the development, and nature of the conversation, etc. We present a large-scale empirical study on the intention of emoji usage conducted on 2,712 Open Source Software (OSS) projects. We build a machine learning model to automate classifying the intentions behind emoji usage in 39,980 posts. We also surveyed 60 open-source software developers from 17 countries to understand developers’ perceptions of why and when emojis are used. Our results show that we can classify the intention of emoji usage with high accuracy (AUC of 0.97). In addition, the results indicate that developers use emoji for varying intentions, and emoji usage intention changes throughout a conversation. Our study opens a new avenue in Software Engineering research related to automatically identifying the intention of the emoji use that can help improve the communication efficiency and help project maintainers monitor and ensure the quality of communication. Another thread of future research could look into what intentions of emoji usage or what kind of emojis are more likely to attract users and how that is associated with emoji usage diffusion in different levels (threads, projects, etc.)