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....

What Do You See in Your Bot? Lessons from KAS Bank

The introduction of robotic process automation (RPA) has created an opportunity for humans to interact with bots. While the promise of RPA has been widely discussed, there are reports suggesting that firms struggle to benefit from RPA. Clearly, interactions between bots and humans do not always yield expected efficiencies and service...