Don't Disturb Me: Challenges of Interacting with SoftwareBots on Open Source Software Projects

TL;DR

This paper investigates the disruptive challenges posed by software bots in open source projects, highlighting noise as a key issue affecting communication and workflow, based on interviews with practitioners.

Contribution

It presents a theory on how developers perceive annoying bot behaviors as noise, aiding understanding of human-bot interactions in social coding environments.

Findings

Noise is a central problem caused by bots in OSS projects.

Annoying bot behaviors are perceived as disruptive and distracting.

Understanding noise can improve human-bot interaction support.

Abstract

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.