Sentiment Analysis of Developers’ Comments on GitHub Repository: A Study

Abstract

The sentiments of developers play a major role in productivity, code quality, and satisfaction. The workload of the developers and their interest in a specific programming language affect the overall quality of the development process. Open source projects, where developers (or contributors) work based on their interest in contributing to the project apart of their routine work. In this paper, we are analysing the sentiments of the developers on GitHub while working on different open source projects. Our study mainly focuses on three aspects: (1) analysing the day of the week in which the comment was made by the developer, (2) emotions of the developer throughout the course of a project, and (3) emotions with different programming languages. The analysis was done by looking into the developer comments on issues, pull requests, and comments for the repository. Our results show that projects developed on Monday’s tend to more negative emotion. Additionally, comments written in issues have higher negative polarity in their sentimental content, and projects developed in Java and Python have more positive comments as compared to C and C++.