Software bots are used to streamline tasks in Open Source Software (OSS) projects' pull requests, saving development cost, time, and effort. However, their presence can be disruptive to the community. We identified several challenges caused by bots in pull request interactions by interviewing 21 practitioners, including project maintainers, contributors, and bot developers. In particular, our findings indicate noise as a recurrent and central problem. Noise affects both human communication and development workflow by overwhelming and distracting developers. Our main contribution is a theory of how human developers perceive annoying bot behaviors as noise on social coding platforms. This contribution may help practitioners understand the effects of adopting a bot, and researchers and tool designers may leverage our results to better support human-bot interaction on social coding platforms.
翻译:软体软件被用于简化开放源码软件(OSS)项目的拉动请求中的任务,节省开发成本、时间和努力。 但是,它们的存在可能会干扰社区。 我们通过采访21位执行人员,包括项目维护人员、贡献者和机器人开发人员,确定了机器人在拉动请求中互动产生的若干挑战。 特别是,我们的研究结果表明噪音是一个经常性和中心问题。 噪音通过压倒和分散开发人员的方式影响人类通信和发展工作流程。 我们的主要贡献是人类开发人员如何将烦人的机器人行为视为社会编码平台上的噪音的理论。 这一贡献可能帮助实践人员理解采用机器人的影响,研究人员和工具设计者可以利用我们的成果更好地支持社会编码平台上的人类机器人互动。