Do Bots Modify the Workflow of GitHub Teams?

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the integration of automated bots in GitHub teams influences their workflow, revealing that teams with bots tend to intersperse comments more frequently during development activities.

Contribution

It introduces a contrast motif discovery method to analyze event sequences, providing novel insights into the impact of bots on team communication patterns.

Findings

Teams with bots intersperse comments more frequently.

Bots do not increase overall commenting activity.

Workflow modifications are detectable through sequence analysis.

Abstract

The ever-increasing complexity of modern software engineering projects makes the usage of automated assistants imperative. Bots can be used to complete repetitive tasks during development and testing, as well as promoting communication between team members through issue reporting and documentation. Although the ultimate aim of these automated assistants is to speed taskwork completion, their inclusion into GitHub repositories may affect teamwork as well. This paper studies the question of how bots modify the team workflow. We examined the event sequences of repositories with bots and without bots using a contrast motif discovery method to detect subsequences that are more prevalent in one set of event sequences vs. the other. Our study reveals that teams with bots are more likely to intersperse comments throughout their coding activities, while not actually being more prolific commenters.