When and Why Do Software Developers Face Uncertainty?

Abstract

Recently, many developers begin to notice that uncertainty is a crucial problem in software development. Unfortunately, no one knows how often uncertainty appears or what kinds of uncertainty exist in actual projects, because there are no empirical studies on uncertainty. To deal with this problem, we conduct a large-scale empirical study analyzing commit messages and revision histories of 1,444 OSS projects randomly selected from the GitHub repositories. The main findings are as follows: 1) Uncertainty exists in the ratio of 1.44% (average); 2) Uncertain program behavior, uncertain variable/value/name, and uncertain program defects are major kinds of uncertainty; and 3) Sometimes developers tend to take an action for not resolving but escaping or ignoring uncertainty. Uncertainty exists everywhere in a certain percentage and developers cannot ignore the existence of uncertainty.