Together or Apart? Investigating a mediator bot to aggregate bot's comments on pull requests

TL;DR

This paper introduces FunnelBot, a mediator bot designed to reduce information overload in pull request discussions, especially aiding newcomers, by aggregating bot comments and improving communication clarity.

Contribution

The study presents the design and evaluation of FunnelBot, a novel mediator bot that aggregates bot comments to mitigate noise and support newcomers in software repositories.

Findings

FunnelBot reduces perceived information overload among newcomers.

Developers prefer aggregated bot comments for clarity.

The approach supports better onboarding for new contributors.

Abstract

Software bots connect users and tools, streamlining the pull request review process in social coding platforms. However, bots can introduce information overload into developers' communication. Information overload is especially problematic for newcomers, who are still exploring the project and may feel overwhelmed by the number of messages. Inspired by the literature of other domains, we designed and evaluated FunnelBot, a bot that acts as a mediator between developers and other bots in the repository. We conducted a within-subject study with 25 newcomers to capture their perceptions and preferences. Our results provide insights for bot developers who want to mitigate noise and create bots for supporting newcomers, laying a foundation for designing better bots.