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.

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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 approaches to identify bots at specific activity levels (issue/pull request or commit), considering a single repository and disregarding features that showed to be effective in other domains. To address this gap, we propose using a machine learning-based approach to identify the bot accounts regardless of their activity level. We selected and extracted 19 features related to the account's profile information, activities, and comment similarity. Then, we evaluated the performance of five machine learning classifiers using a dataset that has more than 5,000 GitHub accounts. Our results show that the Random Forest classifier performs the best, with an F1-score of 92.4% and AUC of 98.7%. Furthermore, the account profile information (e.g., account login) contains the most relevant features to identify the account type. Finally, we compare the performance of our Random Forest classifier to the state-of-the-art approaches, and our results show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art techniques in identifying the account type regardless of their activity level.

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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 practitioners. We elicited 22 design strategies for a bot mediator or the pull request user interface (“the promising”). Participants envisioned a separate place in the pull request interface for bot interactions and a bot mediator that can summarize and customize other bots’ actions to mitigate noise. We also collected participants’ perceptions about a prototype implementing the envisioned strategies. Our design strategies can guide the development of future bots and social coding platforms. @en

Software bots have been facilitating several development activities
in Open Source Software (OSS) projects, including code review. However,
these bots may bring unexpected impacts to group dynamics, as frequently
occurs with new technology adoption. Understanding and anticipating such
effects is important for planning and management. To analyze these effects, we
investigate how several activity indicators change after the adoption of a code
review bot. We employed a regression discontinuity design on 1,194 software
projects from GitHub. We also interviewed 12 practitioners, including open-
source maintainers and contributors. Our results indicate that the adoption
of code review bots increases the number of monthly merged pull requests,
decreases monthly non-merged pull requests, and decreases communication
among developers. From the developers’ perspective, these effects are explained
by the transparency and confidence the bot comments introduce, in addition
to the changes in the discussion focused on pull requests. Practitioners and
maintainers may leverage our results to understand, or even predict, bot effects
on their projects.@en

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. Finally, we discuss the challenges related to interacting with and developing software bots.@en