Anger and Its Direction in Collaborative Software Development

Recent research has provided evidence that software developers experience a wide range of emotions. We argue that among those emotions anger deserves special attention as it can serve as an onset for tools supporting collaborative software development. This, however, requires a fine-grained model of the anger emotion, able to distinguish between anger directed towards self, others, and objects. Detecting anger towards self could be useful to support developers experiencing difficulties, detection of anger towards others might be helpful for community management, detecting anger towards objects might be helpful to recommend and prioritize improvements. As a first step towards automatic identification of anger direction, we built a classifier for anger direction, based on a manually annotated gold standard of 723 sentences that were obtained by mining comments in Apache issue reports.