Together or Apart? Investigating a mediator bot to aggregate bot's comments on pull requests

Software bots connect users and tools, streamlining the pull request review process in social coding platforms. However, bots can introduce information overload into developers' communication. Information overload is especially problematic for newcomers, who are still exploring the project and...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inProceedings - Conference on Software Maintenance (1987) pp. 434 - 438
Main Authors Ribeiro, Eric, Nascimento, Ronan, Steinmacher, Igor, Xavier, Laerte, Gerosa, Marco, de Paula, Hugo, Wessel, Mairieli
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 01.10.2022
Subjects
Aggregates
Chatbots
Encoding
GitHub Bots
Open Source Software
Software Bots
Software development management
Software Engineering
Software maintenance
Online AccessGet full text
ISSN2576-3148
DOI10.1109/ICSME55016.2022.00054

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Summary:Software bots connect users and tools, streamlining the pull request review process in social coding platforms. However, bots can introduce information overload into developers' communication. Information overload is especially problematic for newcomers, who are still exploring the project and may feel overwhelmed by the number of messages. Inspired by the literature of other domains, we designed and evaluated FunnelBot, a bot that acts as a mediator between developers and other bots in the repository. We conducted a within-subject study with 25 newcomers to capture their perceptions and preferences. Our results provide insights for bot developers who want to mitigate noise and create bots for supporting newcomers, laying a foundation for designing better bots.
ISSN:2576-3148
DOI:10.1109/ICSME55016.2022.00054