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Access Type

WSU Access

Date of Award

January 2024

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Department

Computer Science

First Advisor

Amiangshu Bosu

Abstract

Toxicity occurs during the developers' interaction in Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects. Prior studies in the Software Engineering domain reported toxic and unhealthy conversations during the developer's communication. These unhealthy behaviors may reduce the professional harmony and productivity of FOSS projects. For example, toxic code review comments may raise pushback from an author to complete suggested changes. Toxic communication with another person may hamper future communication and collaboration. Research also suggests that toxicity disproportionately impacts newcomers, women, and other participants from marginalized groups in open source communities. Therefore, toxicity is a barrier to promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion in the FOSS community. Since toxic communications are not uncommon among FOSS communities and such communications may have serious repercussions, the primary objective of this dissertation is to automatically identify and mitigate toxicity during developers' textual interactions. On this goal, this dissertation completed three studies, which include i) building an automated toxicity detector for the Software Engineering (SE) domain, ii) developing an explainable toxicity detection tool for SE conversations, iii) an empirical investigation of the impacts of toxicity on the outcomes of FOSS projects.

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