Current and Future Bots in Software Development

Paper in proceeding, 2019

Bots that support software development ("DevBots") are seen as a promising approach to deal with the ever-increasing complexity of modern software engineering and development. Existing DevBots are already able to relieve developers from routine tasks such as building project images or keeping dependencies up-to-date. However, advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence hold the promise of future, significantly more advanced, DevBots. In this paper, we introduce the terminology of contemporary and ideal DevBots. Contemporary DevBots represent the current state of practice, which we characterise using a facet-based taxonomy. We exemplify this taxonomy using 11 existing, industrial-strength bots. We further provide a vision and definition of future (ideal) DevBots, which are not only autonomous, but also adaptive, as well as technically and socially competent. These properties may allow ideal DevBots to act more akin to artificial team mates than simple development tools.