Projects on GitHub rely on the automation provided by software development bots. Nevertheless, the presence of bots can be annoying and disruptive to the community. Backed by multiple studies with ...practitioners, this article provides guidelines for developing and maintaining software bots.
Software bots have been facilitating several development activities in Open Source Software (OSS) projects, including code review. However, these bots may bring unexpected impacts to group dynamics, ...as frequently occurs with new technology adoption. Understanding and anticipating such effects is important for planning and management. To analyze these effects, we investigate how several activity indicators change after the adoption of a code review bot. We employed a regression discontinuity design on 1,194 software projects from GitHub. We also interviewed 12 practitioners, including open-source maintainers and contributors. Our results indicate that the adoption of code review bots increases the number of monthly merged pull requests, decreases monthly non-merged pull requests, and decreases communication among developers. From the developers’ perspective, these effects are explained by the transparency and confidence the bot comments introduce, in addition to the changes in the discussion focused on pull requests. Practitioners and maintainers may leverage our results to understand, or even predict, bot effects on their projects.
Almost there Steinmacher, Igor; Pinto, Gustavo; Wiese, Igor Scaliante ...
2018 IEEE/ACM 40th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE),
05/2018
Conference Proceeding
Recent studies suggest that well-known OSS projects struggle to find the needed workforce to continue evolving---in part because external developers fail to overcome their first contribution ...barriers. In this paper, we investigate how and why quasi-contributors (external developers who did not succeed in getting their contributions accepted to an OSS project) fail. To achieve our goal, we collected data from 21 popular, non-trivial GitHub projects, identified quasi-contributors, and analyzed their pull-requests. In addition, we conducted surveys with quasi-contributors, and projects' integrators, to understand their perceptions about nonacceptance. We found 10,099 quasi-contributors --- about 70% of the total actual contributors --- that submitted 12,367 nonaccepted pull-requests. In five projects, we found more quasi-contributors than actual contributors. About one-third of the developers who took our survey disagreed with the nonacceptance, and around 30% declared the nonacceptance demotivated or prevented them from placing another pull-request. The main reasons for pull-request nonacceptance from the quasi-contributors' perspective were "superseded/duplicated pull-request" and "mismatch between developer's and team's vision/opinion." A manual analysis of a representative sample of 263 pull-requests corroborated with this finding. We also found reasons related to the relationship with the community and lack of experience or commitment from the quasi-contributors. This empirical study is particularly relevant to those interested in fostering developers' participation and retention in OSS communities.
Software engineering bots are applications that are able to react to external stimuli, such as events triggered by tools and messages posted by users, and run automated tasks in response, working as ...an interface between users and services. Bots often include conversational capabilities to interact with end users through textual messages (in chatbots) and speech (in voicebots) in the same communication channels as their human counterparts. Bots can support technical and social activities in software engineering, including communication and decision making.
GitHub Actions: The Impact on the Pull Request Process Wessel, Mairieli; Vargovich, Joseph; Gerosa, Marco A. ...
Empirical software engineering : an international journal,
11/2023, Letnik:
28, Številka:
6
Journal Article
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Software projects frequently use automation tools to perform repetitive activities in the distributed software development process. Recently, GitHub introduced
GitHub Actions
, a feature providing ...automated workflows for software projects. Understanding and anticipating the effects of adopting such technology is important for planning and management. Our research investigates how projects use
GitHub Actions
, what the developers discuss about them, and how project activity indicators change after their adoption. Our results indicate that 1,489 out of 5,000 most popular repositories (almost 30% of our sample) adopt
GitHub Actions
and that developers frequently ask for help implementing them. Our findings also suggest that the adoption of
GitHub Actions
leads to more rejections of pull requests (PRs), more communication in accepted PRs and less communication in rejected PRs, fewer commits in accepted PRs and more commits in rejected PRs, and more time to accept a PR. We found similar results when segmenting our results by categories of
GitHub Actions
. We suggest practitioners consider these effects when adopting
GitHub Actions
on their projects.
Labeling issues with the skills required to complete them can help contributors to choose tasks in Open Source Software projects. However, manually labeling issues is time-consuming and error-prone, ...and current automated approaches are mostly limited to classifying issues as bugs/non-bugs. We investigate the feasibility and relevance of automatically labeling issues with what we call “API-domains,” which are high-level categories of APIs. Therefore, we posit that the APIs used in the source code affected by an issue can be a proxy for the type of skills (e.g., DB, security, UI) needed to work on the issue. We ran a user study (n=74) to assess API-domain labels’ relevancy to potential contributors, leveraged the issues’ descriptions and the project history to build prediction models, and validated the predictions with contributors (n=20) of the projects. Our results show that (i) newcomers to the project consider API-domain labels useful in choosing tasks, (ii) labels can be predicted with a precision of 84% and a recall of 78.6% on average, (iii) the results of the predictions reached up to 71.3% in precision and 52.5% in recall when training with a project and testing in another (transfer learning), and (iv) project contributors consider most of the predictions helpful in identifying needed skills. These findings suggest our approach can be applied in practice to automatically label issues, assisting developers in finding tasks that better match their skills.
Participation in Open Source Software (OSS) projects offers real software development experience for students and other newcomers seeking to develop their skills. However, onboarding to an OSS ...project brings various challenges, including finding a suitable task among various open issues. Selecting an appropriate starter task requires newcomers to identify the skills needed to solve a project issue and avoiding tasks too far from their skill set. However, little is known about how effective newcomers are in identifying the skills needed to resolve an issue. We asked 154 undergrad students to evaluate issues from OSS projects and infer the skills needed to contribute. Students reported a total of 94 skills, which we classified into 10 categories. We compared the students' answers to those collected from 6 professional developers. In general, students misidentified and missed several skills (f-measure=0.37). Students had results closer to professional developers for skills related to database, operating infrastructure, programming concepts, and programming language, and they had worse results in identifying skills related to debugging and program comprehension. Our results can help educators who seek to use OSS as part of their courses and OSS communities that want to label newcomer-friendly issues to facilitate onboarding of new contributors.
Teaching introductory programming requires knowledge of both content and pedagogy. Pedagogy includes understanding the typical difficulties students face as they learn, as well as recognizing ...didactic strategies professors can use to help students to overcome these difficulties. Our research aims to improve the pedagogical knowledge instructors have to teach introductory programming courses, especially those new in this area. We conducted 16 semi-structured interviews with instructors who teach introductory programming courses and collected diaries filled by 110 students during their studies. Qualitative analysis of this data revealed a set of difficulties students faced when learning programming basics and a set of didactic strategies professors use to mitigate them. The results were reviewed by senior instructors in order to confirm them and by junior instructors to verify the importance of this material from their perspective. The main contribution of our paper is a set of difficulties faced by students learning programming, a classification of the most harmful challenges, and the didactic strategies usually used to teach and avoid them. Thus, we provide the basis for the pedagogical content necessary to junior and senior professors planning introductory programming courses.
Online discussion forums are asynchronous communication tools that are widely used in Learning Management Systems. However, instructors and students face various difficulties, and instructors lack a ...guide on what strategies they can use to achieve a more participatory forum environment. This work aims to identify benefits and difficulties of using online discussion forums from the instructors’ point of view, and to provide a list of strategies and improvements that can mitigate the challenges and lead to a more participatory forum. We used coding procedures to analyze data collected through semi-structured interviews. The results of our exploratory analysis are relevant to the distance learning community and can inform instructors, developers, and researchers to help them improve the quality of mediation and use of forums.
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