Bots Coordinating Work in Open Source Software Projects

Abstract

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The evolution of software development orchestration: current state and an agenda for future research

“…Bots have been performing an increasing proportion of coordination activity to enable human software developers to collaborate (Ferrara et al, 2016). Hukal et al (2019) recently examined and classified the various functions that bots perform in the Kubernetes project managed on GitHub. They found bots performing activities of varying degrees of sophistication from broker bots that follow simple rules to manage tasks that do not necessitate human involvement to intelligent manager bots that manage and prioritise workflows of developers in real time (Hukal et al, 2019).…”

“…Hukal et al (2019) recently examined and classified the various functions that bots perform in the Kubernetes project managed on GitHub. They found bots performing activities of varying degrees of sophistication from broker bots that follow simple rules to manage tasks that do not necessitate human involvement to intelligent manager bots that manage and prioritise workflows of developers in real time (Hukal et al, 2019). The implications of bots in the orchestration of software development are currently not well understood in the IS discipline.…”

“…Although we have already highlighted preliminary research that has begun to explore the kinds of bots involved in orchestrating software development (Hukal et al, 2019), the number of bots being created and deployed is increasing drastically. Consequently, there remains a strong need to document and characterise the variety of bots being deployed to orchestrate software development.…”

“…In addition to shifts in the participating actors, there has been a notable shift in the components of the broader ecosystem involved in software development orchestration. Orchestration of software development on large-scale open platforms, such as GitHub, increasingly involves the use of bots -algorithms programmed to autonomously perform repeated functions when needed -to manage the numerous and fast-changing inputs of software developers (Hukal et al, 2019). The emergence of IoT has meant that software increasingly needs to be developed to operate on connected devices that themselves generate continuously evolving data streams that shape software functioning.…”

Not all who are bots are evil: A cross-platform analysis of automated agent governance

“…While the importance of agent-driven opinion manipulation is evident, its extensive media coverage led to moral panics (Walsh, 2020) and pushed the research agenda towards studying agents' destructive potential and platform efforts to cull it down. However, such an emphasis is criticized for overestimating agents' manipulative capabilities (Assenmacher et al, 2020), as well as not accounting for other aspects of agent activity that cause changes in digital labour practices (Hukal et al, 2019) and information gate-keeping (Lokot and Diakopoulos, 2016).…”