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...

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...

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...

A governance model for managing Robotics Process Automation (RPA)

Companies today are continually looking for new ways to digitize and automate their processes in order to maximize productivity and efficiency. Existing academic research has shown the efficiency and benefits of process automation using Robotics Process Automation (RPA). Through preliminary research, we observed that most of the companies have...

Human Aided Bots

A chatbot is an example of a text-based conversational agent. While natural language understanding and machine learning techniques advance rapidly, current fully automated chatbots still struggle to serve their users well. Human intelligence, brought by crowd workers, freelancers or even full-time employees can be embodied in the chatbot logic...

Zieke vis en spuisluizen: Onderzoek naar ziekte bij bot (Platichthys flesus) vóór en achter de Afsluitdijk

In de zomer van 1987 sloegen sport- en beroepsvissers alarm over regelmatige vangsten van zieke botten (Platichthys flesus) in de Waddenzee bij Den Oever. Naar aanleiding hiervan kreeg het RIKZ van de Rijkswaterstaatdirecties Noord-Nederland en Noord-Holland de opdracht tot inventarisatie van visziektes in de Waddenzee, en dan met name rondom de...