Understanding User-Bot Interactions for Small-Scale Automation in Open-Source Development
Dongyu Liu, Micah J. Smith, Kalyan K. Veeramachaneni · 2020
Small-scale automation tools, or "bots," have been widely deployed in open-source software development to support manual project maintenance tasks. Though interactions between these bots and human developers can have significant effects on user experience, previous research has instead mostly focused on project outcomes. We reviewed existing small-scale bots in wide use on GitHub. After an in-depth qualitative and quantitative evaluation, we compiled several important design principles for human-bot interaction in this context. Following the requirements, we further propose a workflow to support bot developers.