Bots for Pull Requests

Bots for Pull Requests: The Good, the Bad, and the Promising

Wessel, Mairieli (TU Delft Software Engineering)
Abdellatif, Ahmad (Concordia University)
Wiese, Igor Scaliante (Universidade Tecnológica Federal Do Paraná (UTFPR))
Conte, Tayana (Federal University of Amazonas)
Shihab, Emad (Concordia University)
Gerosa, Marco Aurélio (Universidade de São Paulo; Northern Arizona University)
Steinmacher, Igor (Northern Arizona University)

2022

Software bots automate tasks within Open Source Software (OSS) projects’ pull requests and save reviewing time and effort (“the good”). However, their interactions can be disruptive and noisy and lead to information overload (“the bad”). To identify strategies to overcome such problems, we applied Design Fiction as a participatory method with 32 practitioners. We elicited 22 design strategies for a bot mediator or the pull request user interface (“the promising”). Participants envisioned a separate place in the pull request interface for bot interactions and a bot mediator that can summarize and customize other bots’ actions to mitigate noise. We also collected participants’ perceptions about a prototype implementing the envisioned strategies. Our design strategies can guide the development of future bots and social coding platforms.

Software Bots
GitHub Bots
Human-bot Interaction
Open Source Software
Automation
Collaborative Development
Design Fiction

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:3b5065c0-f83a-4923-aade-5fbb2855df4b

https://doi.org/10.1145/3510003.3512765

Association for Computer Machinery, New York

978-1-4503-9221-1

ICSE '22: Proceedings of the 44th International Conference on Software Engineering

Institutional Repository

conference paper

© 2022 Mairieli Wessel, Ahmad Abdellatif, Igor Scaliante Wiese, Tayana Conte, Emad Shihab, Marco Aurélio Gerosa, Igor Steinmacher