How Do Code Refactoring Activities Impact Software Developers' Sentiments? - An Empirical Investigation Into GitHub Commits
Navdeep Singh, Paramvir Singh · 2017
Affective software engineering deals in exploring and understanding the developers' sentiments associated with specific software development tasks with the goal to unleash various task-to-sentiment relationships. This paper empirically investigates the impact of software code refactoring on the sentiments of developers in open source projects. We perform a comprehensive analysis of sentiments attached with 15 different refactoring activities across the evolution of 60 open source Java projects through mining relevant commit messages. We investigate 3,171 refactoring related commit messages (out of total 615,625 commit messages) representing 4,891 refactoring instances. The study outcome shows that in general software developers express more negative sentiments than positive sentiments, while performing refactoring tasks. It is also found that 5 out of 15 refactoring activities are mainly responsible for this observed outcome.