Sentiment Overflow in the Testing Stack: Analysing Software Testing Posts on Stack Overflow

TL;DR

This study analyzes sentiment expressions in Stack Overflow posts to understand software testers' experiences, revealing how emotions like insecurity and aspiration relate to project complexity and testing practices.

Contribution

It introduces a sentiment analysis approach to explore practitioners' emotional experiences with software testing on Stack Overflow, highlighting factors influencing testing attitudes.

Findings

Sentiments such as insecurity, despair, and aspiration are prevalent among practitioners.

Project complexity influences practitioners' emotional attitudes towards testing.

Sentiment analysis reveals emotional factors impacting testing practices.

Abstract

Software testing is an integral part of modern software engineering practice. Past research has not only underlined its significance, but also revealed its multi-faceted nature. The practice of software testing and its adoption is influenced by many factors that go beyond tools or technology. This paper sets out to investigate the context of software testing from the practitioners' point of view by mining and analyzing sentimental posts on the widely used question and answer website Stack Overflow. By qualitatively analyzing sentimental expressions of practitioners, which we extract from the Stack Overflow dataset using sentiment analysis tools, we discern factors that help us to better understand the lived experience of software engineers with regards to software testing. Grounded in the data that we have analyzed, we argue that sentiments like insecurity, despair and aspiration, have an impact on practitioners' attitude towards testing. We suggest that they are connected to concrete factors like the level of complexity of projects in which software testing is practiced.