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.
@article{arxiv.2001.02553,
title = {Perception and Acceptance of an Autonomous Refactoring Bot},
author = {Marvin Wyrich and Regina Hebig and Stefan Wagner and Riccardo Scandariato},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2001.02553},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
8 pages, 2 figures. To be published at 12th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence (ICAART 2020)