Stress and burnout in open source: toward finding, understanding, and mitigating unhealthy interactions
Abstract
Developers from open-source communities have reported high stress levels from frequent demands for features and bug fixes and from the sometimes aggressive tone of these demands. Toxic conversations may demotivate and burn out developers, creating challenges for sustaining open source. We outline a path toward finding, understanding, and possibly mitigating such unhealthy interactions. We take a first step toward finding them, by developing and demonstrating a measurement instrument (an SVM classifier tailored for software engineering) to detect toxic discussions in GitHub issues. We used our classifier to analyze trends over time and in different GitHub communities, finding that toxicity varies by community and that toxicity decreased between 2012 and 2018.
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Several OSS projects still rely on informal or opaque governance practices, often centered on a few long-standing maintainers.
“Several OSS projects still rely on informal or opaque governance practices, often centered on a few long-standing maintainers [22, 29, 39].”
From Governance in Practice: How Open Source Projects Define and Document Roles (2026) · cites this paper as [39]
This observation reinforces concerns about bottlenecks and burnout in OSS leadership.
“This observation reinforces concerns about bottlenecks and burnout in OSS leadership [22, 39].”
From Governance in Practice: How Open Source Projects Define and Document Roles (2026) · cites this paper as [39]
Cites
VADER: a parsimonious rule-based model for sentiment analysis of social media text
Hutto, C., & Gilbert, E. (2014) · Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media · doi:10.1609/icwsm.v8i1.14550 · Cited by 6,087 · see citing works
The Psychological Meaning of Words: LIWC and Computerized Text Analysis Methods
Tausczik, Y. R., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2010) · Journal of Language and Social Psychology · doi:10.1177/0261927x09351676 · Cited by 5,774 · see citing works
Monroe, B. L., Colaresi, M. P., & Quinn, K. M. (2008) · Political Analysis · doi:10.1093/pan/mpn018 · Cited by 542 · see citing works
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Do Platform Migrations Compromise Content Moderation? Evidence from r/The_Donald and r/Incels
Ribeiro, M. H., Jhaver, S., Zannettou, S., Blackburn, J., De Cristofaro, E., Stringhini, G., & West, R. (2020) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2010.10397 · Cited by 102
Committed to Trust: A Qualitative Study on Security & Trust in Open Source Software Projects
Wermke, D., Wöhler, N., Klemmer, J. H., Fourné, M., Acar, Y., & Fahl, S. (2022) · 2022 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP) · doi:10.1109/sp46214.2022.9833686 · Cited by 42 · see citing works
Governance in Practice: How Open Source Projects Define and Document Roles
Oliveira, P., Conte, T., Gerosa, M., & Steinmacher, I. (2026) · Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering · doi:10.1145/3794860.3794911 · Cited by 2 · see citing works
- Authors
- Raman, N., Cao, M., Tsvetkov, Y., Kästner, C., & Vasilescu, B.
- Affiliations
- University of Maryland, College Park (US)
- Carnegie Mellon University (US)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering: New Ideas and Emerging Results
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2020-06-27
- Pages
- 57-60
- OpenAlex
- W3090115945
- Cited by
- 70
- References
- 3
- Citations by year
- 2026: 13 · 2025: 8 · 2024: 10 · 2023: 10 · 2022: 14 · 2021: 14 · 2020: 1
- FWCI
- 11.20
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering: New Ideas and Emerging Results (ICSE-NIER) (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Science Applications › Open Source Software Innovations
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Software Engineering Research
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Stress and Burnout Research
- Keywords
- open source software, developer burnout, GitHub issues, toxicity detection, support vector classifier, community sustainability
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