# MSRBot: Using Bots to Answer Questions from Software Repositories

## TL;DR

This paper introduces MSRBot, an automated bot system that simplifies extracting valuable information from software repositories, making it easier for developers to access insights without specialized expertise.

## Contribution

The paper presents a novel bot-based approach to automate information retrieval from software repositories, reducing the effort and expertise needed for software maintenance tasks.

## Key findings

- Bots achieved high answer accuracy
- Bots provided faster responses than manual methods
- Participants found the bot's answers useful

## Abstract

Software repositories contain a plethora of useful information that can be used to enhance software projects. Prior work has leveraged repository data to improve many aspects of the software development process, such as, help extract requirement decisions, identify potentially defective code and improve maintenance and evolution. However, in many cases, practitioners are not able to fully benefit from software repositories due to the fact that they need special expertise and dedicated effort to mine their repositories. Therefore, in this paper, we use bots to automate and ease the process of extracting useful information from software repositories. Particularly, we lay out an approach of how bots, layered on top of software repositories, can be used to answer some of the most common software development/maintenance questions facing developers. We perform a preliminary study with 12 participants to validate the effectiveness of the bot. Our findings indicate that using bots achieves very promising results in terms of answer accuracy, speed and usefulness. Our work has the potential to transform the MSR field by significantly lowering the barrier to entry, making the extraction of useful information from software repositories as easy as chatting with a bot.