一句话：通过访谈与情境调查揭示，GitHub 机器人的人性化与自主性如何影响开发者偏好，并建议提供可配置选项。
软件机器人对协作开发很重要，但已有研究发现，机器人通信过于频繁会令开发者反感。本文关注在 GitHub pull request 场景中，人机协作的其他特征如何影响开发者偏好。作者采用探索性序贯研究，先进行访谈，再开展基于情境（vignette）的问卷调查。结果表明，开发者总体上偏好亲切但自主性较低的机器人；不过，经验更丰富的开发者更倾向于自主性更高的机器人。基于这些实证证据，作者建议机器人开发者增加配置选项，使个人开发者与项目能够根据自身偏好和项目文化配置机器人。
Software bots fulfill an important role in collective software development, and their adoption by developers promises increased productivity. Past research has identified that bots that communicate too often can irritate developers, which affects the utility of the bot. However, it is not clear what other properties of human-bot collaboration affect developers' preferences, or what impact these properties might have. The main idea of this paper is to explore characteristics affecting developer preferences for interactions between humans and bots, in the context of GitHub pull requests. We carried out an exploratory sequential study with interviews and a subsequent vignette-based survey. We find developers generally prefer bots that are personable but show little autonomy, however, more experienced developers tend to prefer more autonomous bots. Based on this empirical evidence, we recommend bot developers increase configuration options for bots so that individual developers and projects can configure bots to best align with their own preferences and project cultures.
DOI 原文 · arXiv · PDF（开放获取） · DBLP
@inproceedings{abs-2302-05048,
title = {Autonomy Is An Acquired Taste: Exploring Developer Preferences for GitHub Bots},
author = {Amir Ghorbani and Nathan Cassee and Derek Robinson and Adam Alami and Neil A. Ernst and Alexander Serebrenik and Andrzej Wąsowski},
booktitle = {ICSE},
year = {2023},
doi = {10.1109/icse48619.2023.00123}
}