Extending the team with a project-specific bot

TL;DR

This paper discusses the development and evolution of a custom project-specific bot for the Coq team, highlighting its unique advantages over off-the-shelf solutions and detailing its architecture and features.

Contribution

It presents a detailed case study of building and maintaining a custom bot tailored to a specific project, contrasting with common off-the-shelf automation tools.

Findings

Custom bots enable tailored automation features.

Evolution driven by internal feedback improves utility.

Architecture choices support flexible feature development.

Abstract

While every other software team is adopting off-the-shelf bots to automate everyday tasks, the Coq team has made a different choice by developing and maintaining a project-specific bot from the ground up. In this article, we describe the reasons for this choice, what kind of automation this has allowed us to implement, how the many features of this custom bot have evolved based on internal feedback, and the technology and architecture choices that have made it possible.