Do Bots Modify the Workflow of GitHub Teams?
This addresses the impact of automation on software development teams, though it is incremental as it focuses on specific workflow patterns.
The paper investigated how bots affect team workflows on GitHub by analyzing event sequences in repositories with and without bots, finding that teams with bots intersperse comments more throughout coding activities but do not comment more overall.
The ever-increasing complexity of modern software engineering projects makes the usage of automated assistants imperative. Bots can be used to complete repetitive tasks during development and testing, as well as promoting communication between team members through issue reporting and documentation. Although the ultimate aim of these automated assistants is to speed taskwork completion, their inclusion into GitHub repositories may affect teamwork as well. This paper studies the question of how bots modify the team workflow. We examined the event sequences of repositories with bots and without bots using a contrast motif discovery method to detect subsequences that are more prevalent in one set of event sequences vs. the other. Our study reveals that teams with bots are more likely to intersperse comments throughout their coding activities, while not actually being more prolific commenters.