Guidelines for Developing Bots for GitHub

Projects on GitHub rely on the automation provided by software development bots. Nevertheless, the presence of bots can be annoying and disruptive to the community. Backed by multiple studies with practitioners, this article provides guidelines for developing and maintaining software bots.

Quality Gatekeepers: Investigating the Effects of Code Review Bots on Pull Request Activities

Software bots have been facilitating several development activities<br/>in Open Source Software (OSS) projects, including code review. However,<br/>these bots may bring unexpected impacts to group dynamics, as frequently<br/>occurs with new technology adoption. Understanding and anticipating such<br/>effects is important for planning and...

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

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...

Software Bots in Software Engineering: Benefits and Challenges

Software bots are becoming increasingly popular in software engineering (SE). In this tutorial, we define what a bot is and present several examples. We also discuss the many benefits bots provide to the SE community, including helping in development tasks (such as pull request review and integration) and onboarding newcomers to a project....

BotHunter: An Approach to Detect Software Bots in GitHub

Bots have become popular in software projects as they play critical roles, from running tests to fixing bugs/vulnerabilities. However, the large number of software bots adds extra effort to practitioners and researchers to distinguish human accounts from bot accounts to avoid bias in data-driven studies. Researchers developed several...

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