Enhancing developers’ support on pull requests activities with software bots

Wessel, Mairieli

doi:10.1145/3368089.3418539

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 23 publications

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“… Wessel (2020) proposed the concept of a meta-bot which manages all other GitHub bots. The author suggests a study to understand how developers view bots, and provides guidelines to create the metabot.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bots in software engineering: a systematic mapping study

Santhanam

Hecking

Schreiber

et al. 2022

PeerJ Computer Science

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Bots have emerged from research prototypes to deployable systems due to the recent developments in machine learning, natural language processing and understanding techniques. In software engineering, bots range from simple automated scripts to decision-making autonomous systems. The spectrum of applications of bots in software engineering is so wide and diverse, that a comprehensive overview and categorization of such bots is needed. Existing works considered selective bots to be analyzed and failed to provide the overall picture. Hence it is significant to categorize bots in software engineering through analyzing why, what and how the bots are applied in software engineering. We approach the problem with a systematic mapping study based on the research articles published in this topic. This study focuses on classification of bots used in software engineering, the various dimensions of the characteristics, the more frequently researched area, potential research spaces to be explored and the perception of bots in the developer community. This study aims to provide an introduction and a broad overview of bots used in software engineering. Discussions of the feedback and results from several studies provide interesting insights and prospective future directions.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bots in software engineering: a systematic mapping study

Santhanam

Hecking

Schreiber

et al. 2022

PeerJ Computer Science

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Towards Automatic Classification of Design Decisions from Developer Conversations

Josephs

Gilson

Galster

2022

2022 IEEE 19th International Conference on Software Architecture Companion (ICSA-C)

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There’s no Such Thing as a Free Lunch: Lessons Learned from Exploring the Overhead Introduced by the Greenkeeper Dependency Bot in Npm

Rombaut

Côgo

Adams

et al. 2023

ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol.

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Dependency management bots are increasingly being used to support the software development process, for example to automatically update a dependency when a new version is available. Yet, human intervention is often required to either accept or reject any action or recommendation the bot creates. In this paper, our objective is to study the extent to which dependency management bots create additional, and sometimes unnecessary, work for their users. To accomplish this, we analyze 93,196 issue reports opened by Greenkeeper , a popular dependency management bot used in open source software projects in the npm ecosystem. We find that Greenkeeper is responsible for half of all issues reported in client projects, inducing a significant amount of overhead that must be addressed by clients, since many of these issues were created as a result of Greenkeeper taking incorrect action on a dependency update (i.e., false alarms). Reverting a broken dependency update to an older version, which is a potential solution that requires the least overhead and is automatically attempted by Greenkeeper , turns out to not be an effective mechanism. Finally, we observe that 56% of the commits referenced by Greenkeeper issue reports only change the client’s dependency specification file to resolve the issue. Based on our findings, we argue that dependency management bots should (i) be configurable to allow clients to reduce the amount of generated activity by the bots, (ii) take into consideration more sources of information than only the pass/fail status of the client’s build pipeline to help eliminate false alarms, and (iii) provide more effective incentives to encourage clients to resolve dependency issues.

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Enhancing developers’ support on pull requests activities with software bots

Cited by 3 publications

References 23 publications

Bots in software engineering: a systematic mapping study

Bots in software engineering: a systematic mapping study

Towards Automatic Classification of Design Decisions from Developer Conversations

There’s no Such Thing as a Free Lunch: Lessons Learned from Exploring the Overhead Introduced by the Greenkeeper Dependency Bot in Npm

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