Leveraging software bots to enhance developers' collaboration in online programming communities

Abstract

Software bots are applications that are integrated into human communication channels, serving as an interface between users and other tools. Due to their focus on task automation, bots have become particularly relevant for Open Source Software (OSS) projects hosted on GitHub. While bots are adopted to save developers' costs, time, and effort, the interaction of these bots can be disruptive to the community. My research goal is two-fold: (i) identify problems caused by bots that interact in pull requests, and (ii) help bot designers to enhance existing bots, thereby improving the partnership with contributors and maintainers. Toward this end, we are interviewing developers to understand what are the problems on the human-bot interaction and how they affect human collaboration. Afterwards, we will employ Design Fiction to capture the developers' vision of bots' capabilities, in order to define guidelines for the design of bots on social coding platforms, and derive requirements for a meta-bot to deal with the problems. This work contributes more broadly to the design and use of software bots to enhance developers' collaboration and interaction.