SENTIMENT ANALYSIS OF FREE/OPEN SOURCE DEVELOPERS: PRELIMINARY FINDINGS FROM A CASE STUDY

Resumen

Software development is a human intensive activity. And as such, how developers face their tasks is of major importance. In an environment such as the one that is common in FOSS (free/open source software) projects where professionals (i.e., paid developers) share the development effort with volunteers, the morale of the development and user community is of major importance. In this paper, we present a preliminary analysis using sentiment analysis techniques to a FOSS project. We therefore mine the mailing list of a project and apply these techniques to the most relevant participants. Although the application is at this time limited, we hope that this experience can be of benefit in the future to determine situations that may affect the developers or the project, such as low productivity, developer abandonment, project forking, etc.