Sentiment and Emotion in Software Engineering

We are glad to present the "Sentiment and Emotion in Software Engineering" special issue of IEEE Software. In recent years, this topic has gained attention from both the research community and industry. Indeed, academic researchers have organized a number of highly successful workshops, such as the International Workshop on Emotional Awareness in Software Engineering (SEmotion) in 2016-2019. The topic was also explored in a special issue of The Journal of Systems and Software.¹ Both small and large companies have considered emotions in some aspects of their work. For example, Microsoft considers emotions in the context of inclusive hiring and support of neurodiverse developers.² Meanwhile, SkyTV aims at enhancing productivity of teams³ by increasing their emotional awareness. Yet another company, source{d}, designs techniques for detection of sentiment in source-code repositories.⁴