  With the increase in acceptance of open source platforms for knowledge
sharing, Question and Answer (Q\&A) websites such as Stack Overflow have become
increasingly popular in the programming domain. Many novice programmers visit
Stack Overflow for reasons that include posing questions, finding answers for
issues they come across in the process of programming. Practitioners
voluntarily answer questions on Stack Overflow based on their experience or
prior knowledge. Most of these answers are also accompanied by comments from
users of Stack Overflow. Questions, answers and comments on Stack Overflow also
include sentiments of users, which when analysed and presented could motivate
users in reading and contributing to the posts. However, the sentiment of these
posts is not being depicted in the current Stack Overflow platform. There is
extensive research on analysing sentiments on social networking platforms such
as twitter. Representing sentiment of a post might motivate users to follow or
answer certain posts. While there exist several tools that augment or annotate
Stack Overflow platform for developers, we are not aware of tools that deal
with sentiment of the posts. In this paper, we propose StackEmo as a Google
Chrome plugin to augment comments on Stack Overflow with emojis, based on the
sentiment of the comments posted, with the aim to provide users with visual
cues that could motivate the users to review and contribute to available
comments. We evaluated StackEmo through an in-user likert scale based survey
with 30 university students. The results of the survey provided us insights on
improving StackEmo, with 83% participants having recommended the plugin to
their peers.
