Investigating developers’ sentiments associated with software cloning practices

Abstract

Researchers through empirical observations have established that efficiency of software development tasks and their output relies upon software developer’s associated persuasions. Thus, empathizing software developer’s sentiments has now become one of the goals of an effective Software Engineering. This paper presents the developers’ sentiments associated with software cloning practices. SentiStrength, a frequently used Sentiment Analysis tool in software engineering is used to explore the sentiment polarity of the developers during programming tasks. 39 responses collected via online industrial survey were analyzed with SentiStrength tool. Sentiment Analysis performed on the developer responses mainly indicate the neutral polarity i.e. developers under study don’t think clones and cloning practices as good or bad practice, instead 71.79% expressed neutral sentiments. The collected opinions indicate neither the acceptance nor rejection of harmfulness or benefits of clones, rather depicted the neutral opinion of software developers towards clones.