Analysis of Factors Influencing Developers’ Sentiments in Commit Logs: Insights from Applying Sentiment Analysis

Abstract

Background: In the open source software paradigm, software development depends upon efforts of volunteer members that are geographically dispersed and collaborate with each other over the Internet. Communication artifacts like mailing lists, forums, and issue tracking systems are used by developers for communication. The way they express themselves through these communication channels greatly influences their productivity, efficiency of development activities, and survival of the project as well. Therefore, it is essential to understand affective state of developers’ contributions to make software engineering more effective. Aim: This study examined commit logs of seven GitHub projects to analyze developers’ sentiments. This study also investigated the relationship of developers’ sentiments in commit logs with team size of project, type of change activity, and contribution volume. Method: Sentiments of developers are calculated using SentiStrength-SE tool that is specialized in software engineering domain. Results: Our findings revealed that the majority of sentiments conveyed by developers in commit logs were neutral. Furthermore, we found that team size, change activity, and commit contribution volume influenced sentiments conveyed in commit logs. Conclusion: Our findings will help project managers to better understand developer sentiments while performing different software development tasks/activities. It will be beneficial in improving developer productivity and retention.