Developers' Sentiment and Issue Reopening

摘要

Since software engineering is done primarily by humans, the sentiment of the developers is crucial when trying to achieve the best possible results. This study takes a look at a specific instance of this: developer sentiment in relation to issue reopening. In general, issue reopening is something to be avoided as it indicates that something went wrong in the original issue fixing, which means extra work will have to be done to fix it entirely. In this study, we were able to apply a sentiment analysis tool to issue tracking comments and observe how the scores varied across issues with no reopenings, one reopening, and many reopenings. We found evidence that suggests that negative sentiment correlates with issue reopening, although the effect size seems to be rather small.