The Present and Future of Bots in Software Engineering
Emad Shihab, Stefan Wagner, Marco A. Gerosa, Mairieli Wessel, Jordi Cabot
TL;DR
Software engineering increasingly relies on bots to automate events, tasks, and information retrieval across tools and repositories. The paper synthesizes five contributions in the issue: a project-specific bot (Coq bot) demonstrating incremental capability growth; analysis showing over 60% of open-source projects use bots, typically with rule-based, non-interactive behavior; examination of Dependabot customization trade-offs between noise reduction and feature stability; emergence of benchmarking bots enabled by GitHub Actions for performance assessment; and observations on bot activity recognition underscoring detection challenges. Together, these works illuminate current capabilities, trade-offs, and gaps in bot design, configurability, benchmarking, and governance. The discussion highlights practical implications for maintenance, collaboration, and sustainability in open-source software, and sets a research agenda for improving bot coordination, quality assurance, security, and human-bot collaboration.
Abstract
We are witnessing a massive adoption of software engineering bots, applications that react to events triggered by tools and messages posted by users and run automated tasks in response, in a variety of domains. This thematic issues describes experiences and challenges with these bots.