Investigating the Interplay between Developers and Automation
This work addresses a gap in knowledge for software engineering researchers and practitioners, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing studies without introducing a new method or paradigm.
The paper tackles the problem of understanding how context and process influence developers' interactions with automation in software development, proposing the ADEPT theory to identify factors affecting these interactions.
Continuous practices are a staple of the modern software development workflow. Automation, in particular, is widely adopted due to its benefits related to quality and productivity. However, automation, similarly to all other aspects of the software development workflow, interacts with humans (in this case developers). While some work has investigated the impact of automation on developers, it is not clear to what extent context and process influence that impact. We present our ADEPT theory of developers and automation, in an attempt to bridge this gap and identify the possible ways context, process, and other factors may influence how developers perceive, interpret, and interact with automation.