The paper presents an eye tracking pilot study on understanding how developers read and assess sentiment in twenty-four GitHub pull requests containing emoji randomly selected from five different open source applications. Gaze data was collected on various elements of the pull request page in Google Chrome while the developers were tasked with determining perceived sentiment. The developer perceived sentiment was compared with sentiment output from five state-of-the-art sentiment analysis tools. SentiStrength-SE had the highest performance, with 55.56% of its predictions being agreed upon by study participants. On the other hand, Stanford CoreNLP fared the worst, with only 5.56% of its predictions matching that of the participants'. Gaze data shows the top three areas that developers looked at the most were the comment body, added lines of code, and username (the person writing the comment). The results also show high attention given to emoji in the pull request comment body compared to the rest of the comment text. These results can help provide additional guidelines on the pull request review process.
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How Developers and Tools Categorize Sentiment in Stack Overflow Questions - A Pilot Study
The paper presents results from a pilot questionnaire-based study on ten Stack Overflow (SO) questions. Eleven developers were tasked with determining if the SO question sentiment was positive, negative or neutral. The results from the questionnaire indicate that developers mostly rated the sentiment of SO questions as neutral, stating that they received little or no emotional feedback from the questions. Tools that were designed to analyze Software Engineering related texts (SentiStrength-SE, SentiCR, and Senti4SD) were on average more closely aligned with developer ratings for a majority of the questions than general purpose tools for detecting SO question sentiment. We discuss cases where tools and developer sentiment differ along with implications of the results. Overall, the sentiment tool output on the question title and body is more aligned with the developer rating than just the title alone. Since SO is a very common medium of technical exchange, we also report that adding code snippets, short titles, and multiple tags were top three features developers prefer in SO questions in order for it to be answered quickly.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1855756
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10267563
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2021 IEEE/ACM Sixth International Workshop on Emotion Awareness in Software Engineering (SEmotion)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 19 to 22
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/SEmotion52567.2021.00012
