Is Developer Sentiment Related to Software Bugs: An Exploratory Study on GitHub Commits

Abstract

The outcome of software products primarily depends on the developers, including their emotion or sentiment in a software development environment. Developer emotions have been observed to be correlated to several patterns, for instance, task resolution time, developer turnover, etc. by conducting sentiment analysis on software collaborative artifacts like Commits. This study aims to quantify the impact of those patterns by finding a relation between developer sentiment and software bugs. To do so, Fix-Inducing Changes — changes that introduce bugs to the system — are detected, along with changes that precede or fix those bugs. Sentiment of these changes are determined from their Commit messages using Senti4SD. It is statistically observed that Commits that introduce, precede or fix bugs are significantly more negative than regular Commits, with a higher proportion of emotional (non-neutral) messages. It is also found that a distinction between buggy and correct fixes exists based on the message's neutrality.