  Trust is a factor that dramatically contributes to the success or failure of
distributed software teams. We present a research model showing that social
communication between distant developers enables the affective appraisal of
trustworthiness even from a distance, thus increasing project performance. To
overcome the limitations of self-reported data, typically questionnaires, we
focus on software projects following a pull request-based development model and
approximate the overall performance of a software project with the history of
successful collaborations occurring between developers.
