Sentiment Polarity and Bug Introduction

Researchers have shown a growing interest in the affective states (i.e., emotions and moods) of developers while performing software engineering tasks. We investigate the association between developers’ sentiment polarity—i.e., negativity and positivity—and bug introduction. To pursue our research objective, we executed a case-control study in the Mining Software Repository (MSR) context. Our exposures are developers’ negativity and positivity captured, by using sentiment analysis, from commit comments of software repositories; while our “disease” is bug introduction—i.e., if the changes of a commit introduce bugs. We found that developers’ negativity is associated to bug introduction, as well as developers’ positivity. These findings seem to foster a continuous monitoring of developers’ affective states so as to prevent the introduction of bugs or discover bugs as early as possible.