Software bot
A software bot is a type of software agent that is often treated as embodied software in the service of software project management and software engineering. A software bot has an identity and potentially personified aspects in order to serve their stakeholders[1] . Software bots often compose software services and provide an alternative user interface, which is sometimes but not necessary conversational.
Software bots are typically used to execute tasks, suggest actions, engage in dialogue, and promote social and cultural aspects of a software project.[2]
Bot is derived from robot. Although the term bot derives from robots, robots act in the physical world and software bots purely act in the digital world [1]. Some software bots are designed and behave as chatbots, but not all chatbots are software bots.
Usage
Software bots are used to support development activities, such as communication among software developers and automation of repetitive tasks. Software bots have been adopted by several communities related to software development, such as GitHub and Stack Overflow.
GitHub bots have user accounts and can open, close, or comment on pull requests and issues. GitHub bots have been used to assign reviewers, ask contributors to sign the Contributor License Agreement, report continuous integration failures, review code and pull requests, welcome newcomers, run automated tests, merge pull requests, etc.
Wikipedia content can be considered as a type of software, which is interpreted to output formatted text. In this context, [wikipedia bots] can be considered to be software bots that automate a variety of tasks, such as creating stub articles, consistently updating the format of multiple articles, and so on.
Issues and threats
Software bots may not be well accepted by humans. A study from the University of Antwerp[3] has compared how developers active on Stack Overflow perceive answers generated by software bots. They find that developers perceive the quality of software bot-generated answers to be significantly worse if the identity of the software bot is made apparent. By contrast, answers from software bots with human-like identity were better received. In practice, when software bots are used on platforms like GitHub or Wikipedia, their username makes it clear that they are bots, e.g., DependaBot, RenovateBot, User:DatBot, User:SineBot.
Bots may be subject to special rules. For instance, the Github terms of service[4] does not allow `bot` but accepts `machine account`, where a `machine account` has two properties: 1) a human takes full responsibility of the bot's actions 2) it cannot create other accounts.
See also
References
- ^ a b Lebeuf, Carlene; Zagalsky, Alexey; Foucault, Matthieu; Storey, Margaret-Anne (2019). "Defining and Classifying Software Bots: A Faceted Taxonomy". Proceedings of Bots in Software Engineering: 1–6. doi:10.1109/BotSE.2019.00008.
- ^ Team, The SOBotics (2019-09-17). "Meet the Bots that Help Moderate Stack Overflow". Stack Overflow Blog. Retrieved 2019-11-22.
- ^ Murgia, Alessandro; Janssens, Daan; Demeyer, Serge; Vasilescu, Bogdan (2016). "Among the Machines". Proceedings of CHI: 1272–1279. doi:10.1145/2851581.2892311.
- ^ "GitHub Terms of Service - GitHub Help". help.github.com. Retrieved 2019-11-22.