Perception and Acceptance of an Autonomous Refactoring Bot

Marvin Wyrich, Regina Hebig, Stefan Wagner, Riccardo Scandariato

2020

Abstract

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.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Wyrich M., Hebig R., Wagner S. and Scandariato R. (2020). Perception and Acceptance of an Autonomous Refactoring Bot. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 1: ICAART, ISBN 978-989-758-395-7, pages 303-310. DOI: 10.5220/0009168803030310

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icaart20,
author={Marvin Wyrich and Regina Hebig and Stefan Wagner and Riccardo Scandariato},
title={Perception and Acceptance of an Autonomous Refactoring Bot},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 1: ICAART,},
year={2020},
pages={303-310},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0009168803030310},
isbn={978-989-758-395-7},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 1: ICAART,
TI - Perception and Acceptance of an Autonomous Refactoring Bot
SN - 978-989-758-395-7
AU - Wyrich M.
AU - Hebig R.
AU - Wagner S.
AU - Scandariato R.
PY - 2020
SP - 303
EP - 310
DO - 10.5220/0009168803030310