The Inconvenient Side of Software Bots on Pull Requests
Mairieli Wessel, Igor Steinmacher
Abstract
Software bots are applications that integrate their work with humans' tasks, serving as conduits between users and other tools. Due to their ability to automate tasks, bots have been widely adopted by Open Source Software (OSS) projects hosted on GitHub. Commonly, OSS projects use bots to automate a variety of routine tasks to save time from maintainers and contributors. Although bots can be useful for supporting maintainers' work, sometimes their comments are seen as spams, and are quickly ignored by contributors. In fact, the way that these bots interact on pull requests can be disruptive and perceived as unwelcoming. In this paper, we propose the concept of a meta-bot to deal with current problems on the human-bot interaction on pull requests. Besides providing additional value to this interaction, meta-bot will reduce interruptions and help maintainers and contributors stay aware of important information.