TY - GEN
T1 - Effects of Adopting Code Review Bots on Pull Requests to OSS Projects
AU - Wessel, Mairieli
AU - Serebrenik, Alexander
AU - Scaliante Wiese, Igor
AU - Steinmacher, Igor
AU - Gerosa, Marco Aurelio
PY - 2020/9/30
Y1 - 2020/9/30
N2 - Software bots, which are widely adopted by Open Source Software (OSS) projects, support developers on several activities, including code review. However, as with any new technology adoption, bots may impact group dynamics. Since understanding and anticipating such effects is important for planning and management, we investigate how several activity indicators change after the adoption of a code review bot. We employed a regression discontinuity design on 1,194 software projects from GitHub. Our results indicate that the adoption of code review bots increases the number of monthly merged pull requests, decreases monthly non-merged pull requests, and decreases communication among developers. Practitioners and maintainers may leverage our results to understand, or even predict, bot effects on their projects’ social interactions.
AB - Software bots, which are widely adopted by Open Source Software (OSS) projects, support developers on several activities, including code review. However, as with any new technology adoption, bots may impact group dynamics. Since understanding and anticipating such effects is important for planning and management, we investigate how several activity indicators change after the adoption of a code review bot. We employed a regression discontinuity design on 1,194 software projects from GitHub. Our results indicate that the adoption of code review bots increases the number of monthly merged pull requests, decreases monthly non-merged pull requests, and decreases communication among developers. Practitioners and maintainers may leverage our results to understand, or even predict, bot effects on their projects’ social interactions.
KW - Code Review
KW - GitHub Bots
KW - Open Source Software
KW - Software Bots
KW - Software Engineering
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85096665299&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/ICSME46990.2020.00011
DO - 10.1109/ICSME46990.2020.00011
M3 - Conference contribution
BT - Proceedings - 2020 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, ICSME 2020
PB - IEEE Computer Society
ER -