MSRBot: Using Bots to Answer Questions from Software Repositories
This work addresses the challenge for software developers in accessing repository data more easily, though it appears incremental as it builds on prior MSR techniques.
The authors tackled the problem of practitioners needing special expertise to mine software repositories by using bots to automate information extraction, and a preliminary study with 12 participants showed promising results in answer accuracy, speed, and usefulness.
Software repositories contain a plethora of useful information that can be used to enhance software projects. Prior work has leveraged repository data to improve many aspects of the software development process, such as, help extract requirement decisions, identify potentially defective code and improve maintenance and evolution. However, in many cases, practitioners are not able to fully benefit from software repositories due to the fact that they need special expertise and dedicated effort to mine their repositories. Therefore, in this paper, we use bots to automate and ease the process of extracting useful information from software repositories. Particularly, we lay out an approach of how bots, layered on top of software repositories, can be used to answer some of the most common software development/maintenance questions facing developers. We perform a preliminary study with 12 participants to validate the effectiveness of the bot. Our findings indicate that using bots achieves very promising results in terms of answer accuracy, speed and usefulness. Our work has the potential to transform the MSR field by significantly lowering the barrier to entry, making the extraction of useful information from software repositories as easy as chatting with a bot.