Perception and acceptance of an autonomous refactoring bot
Paper in proceeding, 2020

The use of autonomous bots for automatic support in software development tasks is increasing. In the past, however, they were not always perceived positively and sometimes experienced a negative bias compared to their human counterparts. We conducted a qualitative study in which we deployed an autonomous refactoring bot for 41 days in a student software development project. In between and at the end, we conducted semi-structured interviews to find out how developers perceive the bot and whether they are more or less critical when reviewing the contributions of a bot compared to human contributions. Our findings show that the bot was perceived as a useful and unobtrusive contributor, and developers were no more critical of it than they were about their human colleagues, but only a few team members felt responsible for the bot.

Refactoring

Human Agent Interaction

Collaborative Development

Software Engineering

Software Bot

Author

Marvin Wyrich

University of Stuttgart

Regina Hebig

University of Gothenburg

Stefan Wagner

University of Stuttgart

Riccardo Scandariato

University of Gothenburg

ICAART 2020 - Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence

Vol. 1 303-310
978-989758395-7 (ISBN)

12th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence, ICAART 2020
Valletta, Malta,

Subject Categories

Human Aspects of ICT

Software Engineering

Information Systemes, Social aspects

DOI

10.5220/0009168803030310

More information

Latest update

1/11/2022