The Inconvenient Side of Software Bots on Pull Requests

Mairieli Wessel, Igor Steinmacher

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

25 Scopus citations

Abstract

Software bots are applications that integrate their work with humans' tasks, serving as conduits between users and other tools. Due to their ability to automate tasks, bots have been widely adopted by Open Source Software (OSS) projects hosted on GitHub. Commonly, OSS projects use bots to automate a variety of routine tasks to save time from maintainers and contributors. Although bots can be useful for supporting maintainers' work, sometimes their comments are seen as spams, and are quickly ignored by contributors. In fact, the way that these bots interact on pull requests can be disruptive and perceived as unwelcoming. In this paper, we propose the concept of a meta-bot to deal with current problems on the human-bot interaction on pull requests. Besides providing additional value to this interaction, meta-bot will reduce interruptions and help maintainers and contributors stay aware of important information.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2020 IEEE/ACM 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering Workshops, ICSEW 2020
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages51-55
Number of pages5
ISBN (Electronic)9781450379632
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 27 2020
Event42nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering Workshops, ICSEW 2020 - Seoul, Korea, Republic of
Duration: Jun 27 2020Jul 19 2020

Publication series

NameProceedings - 2020 IEEE/ACM 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering Workshops, ICSEW 2020

Conference

Conference42nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering Workshops, ICSEW 2020
Country/TerritoryKorea, Republic of
CitySeoul
Period6/27/207/19/20

Keywords

  • bots
  • meta-bot
  • open source software
  • pull-based model
  • software bots

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software

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