Sentiment Identification for Collaborative, Geographically Dispersed, Cross-functional Software Development Teams

The process of software development is a collaborative effort that may consist of various geographically dispersed teams. It involves extensive communication over emails, intra-company forums, blogs, surveys and code reviews. The high level of message and opinion exchange evokes positive and negative emotions regarding the software project delivery. This paper proposed techniques to identify the underlying emotion polarity across various collaborating teams by analyzing the communication during the software release cycle. It also evaluated whether there was a relation between emotion polarity and social factors and software artifacts such as gender, location of team, experience level, release duration, team size, code issue count and code review comments. The sentiment analysis was used to implement an emotion dashboard to measure the project success and emotional health across various cross-functional software development teams. 80% of the managers found the tool useful in improving the overall team morale and 70% managers found the dashboard useful for identifying the emotional health of the collaborating teams.