TY - JOUR
T1 - Don't Disturb Me
T2 - Challenges of Interacting with Software Bots on Open Source Software Projects
AU - Wessel, Mairieli
AU - Wiese, Igor
AU - Steinmacher, Igor
AU - Gerosa, Marco Aurelio
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was partially supported by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior – Brasil (CAPES) – Finance Code 001, CNPq grants 141222/2018-2 and 313067/2020-1, the National Science Foundation under Grant numbers 1815503, 1900903, and UTFPR-Campo Mourão. We also thank the Open Source developers who spent their time to participate in our research.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 ACM.
PY - 2021/10/18
Y1 - 2021/10/18
N2 - Software bots are used to streamline tasks in Open Source Software (OSS) projects' pull requests, saving development cost, time, and effort. However, their presence can be disruptive to the community. We identified several challenges caused by bots in pull request interactions by interviewing 21 practitioners, including project maintainers, contributors, and bot developers. In particular, our findings indicate noise as a recurrent and central problem. Noise affects both human communication and development workflow by overwhelming and distracting developers. Our main contribution is a theory of how human developers perceive annoying bot behaviors as noise on social coding platforms. This contribution may help practitioners understand the effects of adopting a bot, and researchers and tool designers may leverage our results to better support human-bot interaction on social coding platforms.
AB - Software bots are used to streamline tasks in Open Source Software (OSS) projects' pull requests, saving development cost, time, and effort. However, their presence can be disruptive to the community. We identified several challenges caused by bots in pull request interactions by interviewing 21 practitioners, including project maintainers, contributors, and bot developers. In particular, our findings indicate noise as a recurrent and central problem. Noise affects both human communication and development workflow by overwhelming and distracting developers. Our main contribution is a theory of how human developers perceive annoying bot behaviors as noise on social coding platforms. This contribution may help practitioners understand the effects of adopting a bot, and researchers and tool designers may leverage our results to better support human-bot interaction on social coding platforms.
KW - collaborative development
KW - github bots
KW - human-bot interaction
KW - open source software
KW - software bots
KW - software engineering
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85117908779&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85117908779&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3476042
DO - 10.1145/3476042
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85117908779
SN - 2573-0142
VL - 5
JO - Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
JF - Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
IS - CSCW2
M1 - 301
ER -