Perception and Acceptance of an Autonomous Refactoring Bot
This addresses the acceptance of autonomous bots in software development, providing insights for improving bot integration, but it is incremental as it focuses on a specific case study.
The study investigated how developers perceive an autonomous refactoring bot deployed in a student software project, finding that it was seen as useful and unobtrusive, with no increased criticism compared to human contributions, though few team members felt responsible for it.
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.