On the adoption of a TODO bot on GitHub
Hamid Mohayeji, Felipe Ebert, Eric Arts, Eleni Constantinou, Alexander Serebrenik · 2022
Bots support different software maintenance and evolution activities, such as code review or executing tests. Recently, several bots have been proposed to help developers to keep track of postponed activities, expressed by means of TODO comments: e.g., TODO Bot automatically creates a GitHub issue when a TODO comment is added to a repository, increasing visibility of TODO comments. In this work, we perform a preliminary evaluation of the impact of the TODO Bot on software development practice. We conjecture that the introduction of the TODO Bot would facilitate keeping track of the TODO comments, and hence encourage developers to use more TODO comments in their code changes.