Exploration and Exploitation of Developers' Sentimental Variations in Software Engineering

Software development is highly dependent on human efforts and collaborations, which are immensely affected by emotions. This paper presents a quantitative empirical study of the emotional variations in different types of development activities (e.g., bug-fixing tasks), development periods (i.e., days and times) and in projects of different sizes involving teams of variant sizes. The study also includes an in-depth investigation of emotions’ impacts on software artifacts (i.e., commit messages) and exploration of scopes for exploiting emotional variations in software engineering activities. This work is based on careful analyses of emotions in more than 490 thousand commit comments across 50 open-source projects. The findings from this work add to our understanding of the role of emotions in software development, and expose scopes for exploitation of emotional awareness in improved task assignments and collaborations. KEywoRDS Analysis, Development, Emotion, Maintenance, Sentiment, Software