Software bot: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 14:06, 5 August 2023

Revision as of 01:46, 9 August 2023

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* '''Communication channel''' (text, voice, or both)

Erlenhov et al.<ref name="Erlenhov2020">{{Cite journalbook|last1=Erlenhov|first1=Linda|last2=Gomes de Oliveira Neto|first2=Francisco|last3=Leitner|first3=Philipp|yeartitle=2020Proceedings of the 28th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering |titlechapter=An Empiricalempirical Studystudy of Botsbots in Softwaresoftware Developmentdevelopment: Characteristics and Challengeschallenges from a Practitionerpractitioner's Perspectiveperspective |date=2020 |year=2020|chapter-url=https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3368089.3409680|journal=Proceedings of the 28th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering|___location=Virtual Event, USA, Canada|publisher=ACM|pages=445–455|doi=10.1145/3368089.3409680 | arxiv=2005.13969|isbn=9781450370431|s2cid=218971687 }}</ref> raised the question of the difference between a bot and simple automation, since much research done in the name of software bots uses the term bot to describe various different tools and sometimes things are "just" plain old development tools. After interviewing and surveying over 100 developers the authors found that not one, but three definitions dominated the community. They created three personas based on these definitions and the difference between what the three personas see as being a bot is mainly the association with a different

set of human-like traits.

* '''The chat bot persona (Charlie)''' primarily thinks of bots as tools that communicates with the developer through a natural language interface (typically voice or chat), and caring little about what tasks the bot is used for or how it actually implements these tasks.

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== Issues and threats ==

Software bots may not be well accepted by humans. A study from the [[University of Antwerp]]<ref name="MurgiaJanssens2016">{{cite journalbook|last1=Murgia|first1=Alessandro|last2=Janssens|first2=Daan|last3=Demeyer|first3=Serge|last4=Vasilescu|first4=Bogdan|title=Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems |chapter=Among the Machines |journaldate=Proceedings2016 of CHI|year=2016|pages=1272–1279|doi=10.1145/2851581.2892311|isbn=9781450340823|s2cid=13026142}}</ref> has compared how developers active on Stack Overflow perceive answers generated by software bots. They find that developers perceive the quality of software bot-generated answers to be significantly worse if the identity of the software bot is made apparent. By contrast, answers from software bots with human-like identity were better received. In practice, when software bots are used on platforms like GitHub or Wikipedia, their username makes it clear that they are bots, e.g., DependaBot, RenovateBot, DatBot, SineBot.

Bots may be subject to special rules. For instance, the GitHub terms of service<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://help.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-of-service|title=GitHub Terms of Service - GitHub Help|website=help.github.com|access-date=2019-11-22}}</ref> does not allow `bot` but accepts `machine account`, where a `machine account` has two properties: 1) a human takes full responsibility of the bot's actions 2) it cannot create other accounts.