Sentiment Analysis of Commit Comments in GitHub: An Empirical Study

Emotions have a high impact in productivity, task quality, creativity, group rapport and job satisfaction. In this work we use lexical sentiment analysis to study emotions expressed in commit comments of different open source projects and analyze their relationship with different factors such as used programming language, time and day of the week in which the commit was made, team distribution and project approval. Our results show that projects developed in Java tend to have more negative commit comments, and that projects that have more distributed teams tend to have a higher positive polarity in their emotional content. Additionally, we found that commit comments written on Mondays tend to a more negative emotion. While our results need to be confirmed by a more representative sample they are an initial step into the study of emotions and related factors in open source projects.