1. Disrupting Developer Productivity
One Bot at a Time
Margaret-Anne (Peggy) Storey
University of Victoria
http://www.margaretstorey.com
@margaretstorey
#bots4se
CASCON 2016
Alexey Zagalsky, Carlene Lebeuf (UVic)
Alexander Serebrenik, Bin Lin (TU Eindhoven)

2. 1968 1980 1990 2000 20101970
Developer tools over time
Towards the social programmer…
Surveyed over 2,500 devs
Storey et al., ICSE FOSE 2014

3. Social tools facilitate a participatory
development culture in software
engineering, with support for the social
creation and sharing of content, informal
mentorship, and awareness that
contributions matter to one another
Storey, M.-A., L. Singer, F. Figueira Filho, B. Cleary and A. Zagalsky,The (R)evolutionary Role of Social
Media in Software Engineering, ICSE 2014 Future of Software Engineering.

4. Challenges:
Developer
“If you have to go to a web browser there is a
10% chance you'll be distracted. I use the
project "howdoi" to get answers from Stack
Overflow on the command line so I can
stay out of the browser and keep focus."
“One of the biggest issues with fragmentation of the
communication options is that there are so many different ways to
communicate that it’s harder to find it all in one place. Important
communications get lost; Key people don’t see them; They can’t be
retrieved by a single search tool. Companies such as Slack are
attempting to solve this problem, but it has a long way to go.”
Channel confusion and lack of integration:

5. Kevin Kelly, Futurist: “You’ll be paid in the future based
on how well you work with robots.”

6. http://interestingengineering.com/programmer-automates-job-6-years-boss-fires-finds/

7. To Bot or Not?
What is a Bot
How Bots play a role in SE
Disrupting Productivity with Bots
Risks and Research Opportunities

8. What is a bot?
A bot is an application
that performs automated,
repetitive, pre-defined
tasks
From setting an alarm, to
telling you today’s
weather forecast, to
gathering and
broadcasting information

9. Going back in time… 1966

10. Bots — 1988
IRC provided a platform and language for
writing your bots
https://www.wired.com/1996/04/netbots/

12. Microsoft: the operating
system of the future isn’t
Windows, but "conversation
as a platform”

13. aims to replace apps
“one bot at a time”

15. http://fortune.com/2016/10/26/ibm-watson-slack-chatbot/
IBM Watson Lends Brains to Slack's Chatbot
"It could be something like a 20 [percent] or 30 percent
increase in knowledge worker productivity.” Stewart
Butterfield, founder of Slack

16. Defining Bots
From scripts to processes to agents to apps to
integrations to bots… an emerging concept!
One definition?
Conduits between users and services typically through
a conversational UI

17. Proposed Bot Dimensions
What they do…
How intelligent…
How autonomous…
How to interact with them…
How they are created…
@margaretstorey
#bots4se

18. What they do (intent)!
Helpful Bots:
•Chatbots
•Crawlers
•Transactional bots
•Informational bots
•Monitoring (health,
vulnerabilities)
•Art bots
•Game bots
Harmful Bots:
• Hackers
• Spammers
• Scrapers
• Impersonators
• Fraud

19. How intelligent…
Some follow simple rules… (SLT)
passing control to a human if needed
More intelligent bots use NLP
and AI, learn over time
https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/30/the-human-role-in-a-bot-dominated-future/

20. How autonomous…
Extent of human
intervention required
Context
Sensing
Self maintaining

21. How to interact with Bots
Push versus Pull
Command-line versus conversational UI
How much context they use (personalization)
“In conversational UIs,
personality is the new UX”
http://www.fastcodesign.com/3054934/the-next-phase-of-ux-designing-chatbot-personalities

22. Howdy launched Botkit, a library of "building blocks for
building Slack bots”
Microsoft Bot connector:
Requires APIs and developer ecosystem…
How they are created

24. To Bot or Not?
What is a Bot
How Bots play a role in SE
Disrupting Productivity with Bots
Risks and Research Opportunities
@margaretstorey
#bots4se

25. “Scaling to 1000s of developers — automation
is required!” [Jacek Czerwonka]

26. Software development Bot roles
Entertainment Bots
Code Bots
Test Bots
DevOps Bots
Support Bots
Documentation Bots
Categories also inspired by Sven Peters: https://svenpet.com/talks/rise-of-the-machines-automate-your-development/
B. Lin, A. Zagalsky, M.-A. Storey, and A. Serebrenik. Why developers are slacking off: Understanding how
software teams use slack. CSCW 2016 (poster paper).

27. Entertainment Bots
Bots that can entertain, amuse,
play games!
http://www.wired.com/2016/05/giphy-google-gifs-gifts-world-keyboard/

28. Code Bots
Integration of services and task automation:
• Commit code automatically (after review/tests)
• Update/create tasks/issues/bugs (BugBot)
• Conduct/facilitate peer review (find reviewers)
• Automatically merge pull requests (Travis)
“The most important startup’s hardest worker isn’t a person!”

29. Test bots
Bots to detect bugs or code quality issues:
• Run static analysis tests (FindBugs)
• Open issue for code quality concern (Freud)
• Monitor coverage, technical debt over time
• Test UI changes (CompareBot)
• Detect flaky tests

30. DevOps Bots
Help teams manage complex builds and deploy from
within their chat environment:
• Monitor running services
• Coordinate team schedules (who is on call)
• Measure and analyze workflow, improve
feedback
• Stakeholders gain awareness while learning
ChatOps are "putting tools right in the middle of the conversation"
- Jesse Newland, GitHub

31. “Chatting with your infrastructure might seem strange
at first but it's easy to see the benefits. A timeline of
who's deploying what and deployments that are so
easy anyone can trigger them.’'
https://skillsmatter.com/skillscasts/7629-devops-for-slackers-deploying-code-with-a-chat-bot
https://www.pagerduty.com/why-pagerduty/it-operations/

32. Interact with users (at scale) to offer support:
• Answer frequently asked questions (consult
and then build up knowledge base)
• Analyze user feedback, identify and triage
most important bugs to fix
Support Bots

33. Bots that produce documentation from developer
artifacts:
• Author release notes from commit messages
• Integrate analytics and visualizations into reports
and dashboards
• Translating documentation on the fly
• Find/aggregate answers/documentation from
community resources
Documentation Bots

35. https://bvasiles.github.io/papers/chi16bot.pdf

36. To Bot or Not?
What is a Bot
How Bots play a role in SE
Disrupting Productivity with Bots
Risks and Research Opportunities

37. Preliminary productivity framework
of design elements for bots
Efficiency — do things faster
Automate repetitive/tedious tasks
Help developers stay in flow
Effectiveness —work towards meaningful goals
Decision making
Team cognition, self/team regulation
M. Storey and A. Zagalsky, Disrupting Developer Productivity One Bot at a Time, FSE 2016
Visions and Reflections Track, 2016, To appear.
http://www.productiveflourishing.com/a-general-theory-of-productivity/

38. Team cognition
"ChatOps is a collaboration model that connects people,
tools, processes, and automation into a transparent
workflow" — Sean Regan, Atlassian
“The team with the most situational awareness wins”
— Mary Poppendieck, Lean Software Development

39. "The real potential of bots isn’t going to be realized with
one person using one bot (that’s the old app model), but
with multiple people having a normal conversation
while the bots augment the stream with relevant
context and functionality. This is a pretty far-reaching
evolution of how humans interact with technology. It’s
cognitively ergonomic."
Phil Libin, https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/bots-get-serious-my-two-new-investments-
from-general-catalyst-libin

40. Regulation
Regulate individual and team tasks and goals:
initiate and track reminders
promote/adapt to team culture
visualize progress
support coordination across tasks
Arciniegas-Mendez, M., A. Zagalsky, M.-A. Storey, A. F. Hadwin, “Using the Model of Regulation to
Understand Software Development Collaboration Practices and Tool Support”, To appear at CSCW 2017

41. http://meekan.com/slack/
Shared regulation

42. To Bot or Not?
What is a Bot
How Bots play a role in SE
Disrupting Productivity with Bots
Risks and Research Opportunities

43. Risk #1
Will Bots Change how people relate to one
another?
www.nytimes.com/2015/08/04/science/for-sympathetic-
ear-more-chinese-turn-to-smartphone-program.html?_r=0
“Children are learning that it’s safer to talk to a computer
than to another human.” Sherry Turkle

44. Risk #2
What ethical framework should we use for Bots?
https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/16/hard-questions-about-bot-ethics/
Who should the Bot serve?
Is deception ok?
Stalking?
Misuse of sentiment analysis?
Privacy of information that is shared with Bots?
Gendered bots

45. http://www.geekwire.com/2016/why-is-ai-female-how-our-
ideas-about-sex-and-service-influence-the-personalities-we-
give-machines/

46. Risk #3
Be careful what you wish for!

47. Risk #4
When not to Bot?
Information/interactions are not discoverable
Interactions may be ephemeral
Fewer opportunities for serendipity and learning
Direct manipulation better for complex tasks
May bring new disruptions and complexities
[Code Drones to the rescue? Acharya et al, ICSE 2016]

48. The second machine age

49. Expert human + (simple) computer + good process
will beat
many expert machines
(today)

50. “Bots are a test bed for experiments in the area of artificial
intelligence” [Leonard, Andrew. Bots: The Origin of the New Species]
How do these “virtual team members” impact software
developers as well as the projects they participate on?
Improve/understand human bot interaction (disrupting UX)
Ease adoption/discovery of automated software engineering/
computation services
Research opportunities
Would adding “botpower” to a late project make it later?

51. To Bot or Not?
What is a Bot
How Bots play a role in SE
Disrupting Productivity with Bots
Risks and Research Opportunities
Confluence of participatory culture, automation/AI,
conversational UIs/messaging apps
@margaretstorey
#bots4se

52. Margaret-Anne Storey
http://www.margaretstorey.com
mstorey@uvic.ca
Visit our CASCON Poster:
@margaretstorey
#bots4se

53. References 1 of 2
M. Storey, The Evolution of the Social Programmer, Mining Software Repositories
(MSR) 2012 Keynote http://www.slideshare.net/mastorey/msr-2012-keynote-storey-slideshare
M. Storey et al., The (R)evolution of Social Media in Software Engineering, ICSE
Future of Software Engineering 2014, http://www.slideshare.net/mastorey/icse2014-fose-
social-media http://chiselgroup.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/fose14main-storey-submitted.pdf
M. Storey, L. Singer, F. Figueira Filho, A. Zagalsky, and D. German, How Social and
Communication Channels Shape and Challenge a Participatory Culture in
Software Development, Transactions on Software Engineering, to appear.
M. Arciniegas-Mendez, A. Zagalsky, M.-A. Storey, and A. F. Hadwin. Regulation as
an enabler for collaborative software development. In Proceedings of the
Eighth International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software
Engineering, pages 97-100. IEEE Press, 2015.
B. Lin, A. Zagalsky, M.-A. Storey, and A. Serebrenik. Why developers are slacking
off: Understanding how software teams use slack. In Proceedings of the
19th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social
Computing Companion, pages 333{336. ACM, 2016.
M. Storey and A. Zagalsky, Disrupting Developer Productivity One Bot at a
Time, FSE 2016 Visions Track, 2016, to appear.

54. Leonard, Andrew. Bots: The Origin of the New Species. Wired Books,
Incorporated, 1997.
M. P. Acharya, C. Parnin, N. A. Kraft, A. Dagnino, and X. Qu. Code drones. In
Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Software Engineering
Companion, ICSE '16, pages 785-788, New York, NY,USA, 2016. ACM.
M. Poppendieck and T. Poppendieck. Lean Software Development: An Agile
Toolkit. Addison-Wesley, 2003.
A, Murgia, D. Janssens, S, Demeyer, and B, Vasilescu. 2016. Among the
Machines: Human-Bot Interaction on Social Q&A Websites. In Proceedings of
the 2016 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing
Systems (CHI EA '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1272-1279.
References 2 of 2

55. Related blog posts / resources
•https://medium.com/chris-messina/2016-will-be-the-year-of-
conversational-commerce-1586e85e3991#.iadtz4oyt
•http://www.slideshare.net/HollyCummins/confessions-of-an-
automation-addict
•https://medium.muz.li/the-ultimate-guide-to-chatbots-why-theyre-
disrupting-ux-and-best-practices-for-
building-345e2150b682#.h5ira2729
•https://medium.com/the-layer/the-future-of-conversational-ui-
belongs-to-hybrid-interfaces-8a228de0bdb5#.5z1xo0csf
•http://www.zdnet.com/article/ibm-slack-partner-on-watson-
powered-chatbots/