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A Preliminary Study of Bots Usage in Open Source Community

Published: 15 September 2022 Publication History
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  • Abstract

    Bots are seen as a promising approach in software development, which help to deal with the ever-increasing complexity of modern software engineering and development. The number of bots in open source community, such as GitHub, has expanded substantially over the last three years. Due to its increasing popularity, it is essential to characterize the current usage of bots in practices. In this paper, we present an empirical study of bots usage in GitHub community. By analyzing 7,399 projects from GitHub, we find that 4,148 (56%) projects have used bots. Through automatic identification and manual detection, we collect a total of 196 bots. We then analyze and classify them into 4 categories and 14 topics. Finally, we discuss some raised implications for bots in current GitHub community.

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    Cited By

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    • (2023)Detecting Bot on GitHub Leveraging Transformer-based Models: A Preliminary Study2023 30th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC)10.1109/APSEC60848.2023.00087(639-640)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2023
    • (2022)How Does Bot Affect Developer’s Sentiment: An Empirical Study on GitHub Issues and PRs2022 IEEE Smartworld, Ubiquitous Intelligence & Computing, Scalable Computing & Communications, Digital Twin, Privacy Computing, Metaverse, Autonomous & Trusted Vehicles (SmartWorld/UIC/ScalCom/DigitalTwin/PriComp/Meta)10.1109/SmartWorld-UIC-ATC-ScalCom-DigitalTwin-PriComp-Metaverse56740.2022.00268(1856-1861)Online publication date: Dec-2022

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      Published In

      cover image ACM Other conferences
      Internetware '22: Proceedings of the 13th Asia-Pacific Symposium on Internetware
      June 2022
      291 pages
      ISBN:9781450397803
      DOI:10.1145/3545258
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      Published: 15 September 2022

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      Author Tags

      1. Bots
      2. Empirical study
      3. GitHub
      4. Open source

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      • Research-article
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      • Refereed limited

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      • Program of A New Generation of Artificial Intelligence 2030

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      Internetware 2022

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      Overall Acceptance Rate 55 of 111 submissions, 50%

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      View all
      • (2023)Detecting Bot on GitHub Leveraging Transformer-based Models: A Preliminary Study2023 30th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC)10.1109/APSEC60848.2023.00087(639-640)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2023
      • (2022)How Does Bot Affect Developer’s Sentiment: An Empirical Study on GitHub Issues and PRs2022 IEEE Smartworld, Ubiquitous Intelligence & Computing, Scalable Computing & Communications, Digital Twin, Privacy Computing, Metaverse, Autonomous & Trusted Vehicles (SmartWorld/UIC/ScalCom/DigitalTwin/PriComp/Meta)10.1109/SmartWorld-UIC-ATC-ScalCom-DigitalTwin-PriComp-Metaverse56740.2022.00268(1856-1861)Online publication date: Dec-2022

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