Perception and acceptance of an autonomous refactoring bot

Publikationstyp
Conference Paper
Date Issued
2020-02
Sprache
English
Author(s)
Wyrich, Marvin  
Hebig, Regina  
Wagner, Stefan  
Scandariato, Riccardo  
TORE-URI
http://hdl.handle.net/11420/9872
Volume
1
Start Page
303
End Page
310
Citation
International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence (ICAART 2020)
Contribution to Conference
12th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence, ICAART 2020  
Scopus ID
2-s2.0-85083256632
The use of autonomous bots for automatic support in software development tasks is increasing. In the past, however, they were not always perceived positively and sometimes experienced a negative bias compared to their human counterparts. We conducted a qualitative study in which we deployed an autonomous refactoring bot for 41 days in a student software development project. In between and at the end, we conducted semi-structured interviews to find out how developers perceive the bot and whether they are more or less critical when reviewing the contributions of a bot compared to human contributions. Our findings show that the bot was perceived as a useful and unobtrusive contributor, and developers were no more critical of it than they were about their human colleagues, but only a few team members felt responsible for the bot.
Subjects
Collaborative Development
Human Agent Interaction
Refactoring
Software Bot
Software Engineering