The Inconvenient Side of Software Bots on Pull Requests

Wessel, Mairieli; Steinmacher, Igor

doi:10.1145/3387940.3391504

Cited by 32 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…Previous research has already shown that task-oriented GitHub bots can cause friction by lacking social context or disrupting developers' workflows [2]. Wessel and Steinmacher [3] have proposed the promising concept of a meta-bot (aggregating and summarizing information coming from several bots) to alleviate these issues. For several years, we have explored another strategy, that shares some characteristics with a metabot: relying on a multi-task, project-specific bot, directly developed and maintained by the project team.…”

Section: On Collaborative Coding Platformsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Extending the team with a project-specific bot

Zimmermann¹,

Coolen²,

Gross³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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While every other software team is adopting off-the-shelf bots to automate everyday tasks, the Coq team has made a different choice by developing and maintaining a project-specific bot from the ground up. In this article, we describe the reasons for this choice, what kind of automation this has allowed us to implement, how the many features of this custom bot have evolved based on internal feedback, and the technology and architecture choices that have made it possible.

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Section: On Collaborative Coding Platformsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Extending the team with a project-specific bot

Zimmermann¹,

Coolen²,

Gross³

et al. 2021

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…This is in line with our results, as we have seen that dependency bots do not perform advanced dependency usage analysis, sending unnecessary warnings that could be avoided. Wessel et al [34] rise attention on the inconvenient side of software bots. They present empirical evidence that pull requests made by bots are, in some cases, perceived as disruptive and unwelcoming by developers.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Longitudinal Analysis of Bloated Java Dependencies

Soto-Valero¹,

Durieux²,

Baudry³

2021

Preprint

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We study the evolution and impact of bloated dependencies in a single software ecosystem: Java/Maven. Bloated dependencies are third-party libraries that are packaged in the application binary but are not needed to run the application. We analyze the history of 435 Java projects. This historical data includes 48,469 distinct dependencies, which we study across a total of 31,515 versions of Maven dependency trees. Bloated dependencies steadily increase over time, and 89.2 % of the direct dependencies that are bloated remain bloated in all subsequent versions of the studied projects. This empirical evidence suggests that developers can safely remove a bloated dependency. We further report novel insights regarding the unnecessary maintenance efforts induced by bloat. We find that 22 % of dependency updates performed by developers are made on bloated dependencies, and that Dependabot suggests a similar ratio of updates on bloated dependencies.

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“…We manually analyzed pull requests, looking for (i) human users mentioning bots, and (ii) bots' interactions-such as opening, merging, or commenting on pull requests. We noticed that the bots used in pull requests indeed (i) overwhelm developers' communication with notifications and feedback, (ii) perform wrong actions, and (iii) are misused due to their poor documentation [24]. We are currently interviewing open source developers to understand their perspectives about the problems encountered in the state-of-the-practice, and to identify new issues.…”

Section: Phase I -Identification Of Human-bot Interaction Problems Onmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In summary, the meta-bot mediates the action of other bots used on pull requests to mitigate previously identified interaction problems. Compared to other GitHub bots, the meta-bot will provide additional value to the interaction of already existing bots through these key features: (i) summarizing other bots' outcomes to avoid information overload; (ii) supporting developers' questions and requests; (iii) providing configurable feedback; and (iv) helping developers deal with bots' exceptions [24]. The specifics meta-bot requirement will be further defined after conclusion of Phase II (see section 3.3).…”

Section: Phase III -Transforming Design Strategies To Bot Prototypesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These bots help reduce the intensive workload inherent to the pull request model by automating routine tasks and interacting with human developers. Such bots work on different tasks and are usually created as GitHub users that can submit code contributions, interact through comments, and merge or close pull requests [24]. By executing tasks that were previously only performed by human developers, and interacting in the same communication channels as developers, bots have become important voices in the pull request conversation [14].…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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