Advantages of maintaining a multi-task project-specific bot: an experience report

TL;DR

This paper reports on the benefits of maintaining a multi-task, project-specific bot in software projects, highlighting its balance of productivity and adaptability based on experience with the Coq project.

Contribution

It presents a detailed experience report advocating for multi-task, project-specific bots as a flexible automation solution for medium-sized software teams.

Findings

Enhanced productivity and adaptability in the Coq project

Advantages of custom architecture choices for bot maintenance

Generalizable insights for medium-sized software teams

Abstract

Bots are becoming a popular method for automating basic everyday tasks in many software projects. This is true in particular because of the availability of many off-the-shelf task-specific bots that teams can quickly adopt (which are sometimes completed with additional task-specific custom bots). Based on our experience in the Coq project, where we have developed and maintained a multi-task project-specific bot, we argue that this alternative approach to project automation should receive more attention because it strikes a good balance between productivity and adaptibility. In this article, we describe the kind of automation that our bot implements, what advantages we have gained by maintaining a project-specific bot, and the technology and architecture choices that have made it possible. We draw conclusions that should generalize to other medium-sized software teams willing to invest in project automation without disrupting their workflows.