Sentiment analysis of Travis CI builds

Human factors such as sentiments, emotions, mood, and stress along with their potential effect on software development are of paramount importance in software engineering, as we still strongly rely on human-to-human interaction for performing software development activities and driving results. With the advance of sentiment analysis tools, software engineering researchers have investigated the interplay between developers' sentiment and software engineering tasks such as issue fixing times. However, there is a lack of studies analyzing whether there is a relation between developers' sentiment and builds performed by continuous integration servers. Build breakage is not desired as it represents a signal that something went wrong in the software development activity and that extra work or rework should be done. In this paper, we report an empirical assessment over Travis CI builds and the corresponding commits in order to understand a potential association between developers' sentiment and build breakage. We found evidence that negative sentiment both affects and is affected by the result of the build process, although the influence seems to be small. Also, we found that developers tend to be more positive when writing about the CI server in commit messages.