Sentiment Analysis in monitoring software development processes: An exploratory case study on GitHub's project issues

In this article we propose the introduction of Sentiment Analysis techniques in order to identify and monitor the underlying sentiments in the text written by developers in issues and tickets. Therefore, in order to check its viability we conducted an exploratory case study analysing polarity and emotional clues in development issues from nine well-known projects that are freely available. Results show that although both polarity and emotional analysis are applicable, the emotional analysis looks to be more suitable to this kind of corpus. The developers leave underlying sentiments in the text, and that information could be monitored as any other feature in the development process.