An Empirical Study on Developer Migration and Sentiment: Framework Evolution vs. Backward Compatibility
Keywords:
Bug tracking systems, Developer Migrations, Developer Sentiments, Developer Experience, Bug Assignment, developer expertise ranking, Software engineering, Mining software repositoryAbstract
The stability of software frameworks is a fundamental pillar of project sustainability. This paper investigates the phenomenon of ”breaking changes” and their association on developer migration, utilizing transitions in major ecosystems—primarily AngularJS to Angular/React, expanded to include Vue.js and Svelte—as a comprehensive case study. Moving beyond traditional cross platform studies, our methodology leverages a unified data source approach by mining both technical artifacts (commit logs) and Developer Social Networks (DSN) interactions (Issues and Pull Request discussions) exclusively within the GitHub ecosystem. By employing API diffing algorithms and a domain-specific BERT model for Natural Language Processing (NLP) sentiment analysis (Accuracy: 89%), we analyzed a dataset of 5,240 commits and 2,150 explicit migration events. Our findings demonstrate that the lack of backward compatibility generated profound cognitive fatigue and negative sentiment (Average Sentiment:-0.62). Statistical modeling, including Pearson correlation (r =-0.74, p ¡ 0.01) and logistic regression, reveals a statistically significant association between breaking changes, developer sentiment, and migration behavior. This frustration directly correlated with a structural exodus toward alternative frameworks, heavily favoring incremental strategies like React Adapters and Micro Frontends over complete rewrites to escape the ecosystem’s instability. The study highlights how a lack of backward compatibility inflicts severe socio-technical debt, driving developers to abandon frameworks altogether.
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