DevBots can co-design APIs
This addresses the problem of enhancing collaboration between human developers and automated tools in software design, but it is incremental as it builds on existing research to explore a specific application.
The study analyzed 24 articles to investigate the use of DevBots in software development, identifying a gap in collaborative API design and proposing an experiment to compare Retrieval Augmented Generation with other approaches, concluding that DevBots can collaborate with human API designers but with trade-offs.
DevBots are automated tools that perform various tasks in order to support software development. They are a growing trend and have been used in repositories to automate repetitive tasks, as code generators, and as collaborators in eliciting requirements and defining architectures. In this study, we analyzed 24 articles to investigate the state of the art of using DevBots in software development, trying to understand their characteristics, identify use cases, learn the relationship between DevBots and conversational software development, and discuss how prompt engineering can enable collaboration between human developers and bots. Additionally, we identified a gap to address by applying prompt engineering to collaborative API design between human designers and DevBots and proposed an experiment to assess what approach, between using Retrieval Augmented Generation or not, is more suitable. Our conclusion is that DevBots can collaborate with human API designers, but the two approaches have advantages and disadvantages.