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Advantages of maintaining a multi-task project-specific bot: an experience report

Software Engineering 2022-04-28 v1

Abstract

Bots are becoming a popular method for automating basic everyday tasks in many software projects. This is true in particular because of the availability of many off-the-shelf task-specific bots that teams can quickly adopt (which are sometimes completed with additional task-specific custom bots). Based on our experience in the Coq project, where we have developed and maintained a multi-task project-specific bot, we argue that this alternative approach to project automation should receive more attention because it strikes a good balance between productivity and adaptibility. In this article, we describe the kind of automation that our bot implements, what advantages we have gained by maintaining a project-specific bot, and the technology and architecture choices that have made it possible. We draw conclusions that should generalize to other medium-sized software teams willing to invest in project automation without disrupting their workflows.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2204.12758,
  title  = {Advantages of maintaining a multi-task project-specific bot: an experience report},
  author = {Théo Zimmermann and Julien Coolen and Jason Gross and Pierre-Marie Pédrot and Gaëtan Gilbert},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2204.12758},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2112.07365

R2 v1 2026-06-24T10:59:55.374Z