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On the adoption of a TODO bot on GitHub: a preliminary study

Authors:

Hamid Mohayeji,

Eleni Constantinou,

Alexander SerebrenikAuthors Info & Claims

BotSE '22: Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Bots in Software Engineering

Pages 23 - 27

https://doi.org/10.1145/3528228.3528408

Published: 26 October 2022 Publication History

Abstract

Bots support different software maintenance and evolution activities, such as code review or executing tests. Recently, several bots have been proposed to help developers to keep track of postponed activities, expressed by means of TODO comments: e.g., TODO Bot automatically creates a GitHub issue when a TODO comment is added to a repository, increasing visibility of TODO comments. In this work, we perform a preliminary evaluation of the impact of the TODO Bot on software development practice. We conjecture that the introduction of the TODO Bot would facilitate keeping track of the TODO comments, and hence encourage developers to use more TODO comments in their code changes.

To evaluate this conjecture, we analyze all the 2,208 repositories which have at least one GitHub issue created by the TODO Bot. Firstly, we investigate to what extent the bot is being used and describe the repositories using the bot. We observe that the majority (54%) of the repositories which adopted the TODO Bot are new, i.e., were created within less than one month of first issue created by the bot, and from those, more than 60% have the issue created within three days. We observe a statistically significant increase in the number of the TODO comments after the adoption of the bot, however with a small effect size. Our results suggest that the adoption of the TODO Bot encourages developers to introduce TODO comments rendering the postponed decisions more visible. Nevertheless, it does not speed up the process of addressing TODO comments or corresponding GitHub issues.

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Cited By

Wang HGao ZBi TGrundy JWang XWu MYang X(2024)What Makes a Good TODO Comment?ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/366481133:6(1-30)Online publication date: 28-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3664811
Zhang JWu XZhang YXu SPeng M(2024)Enhancing Collaborative Software Development: A Deep Learning Approach for Bot Recommendation2024 IEEE 48th Annual Computers, Software, and Applications Conference (COMPSAC)10.1109/COMPSAC61105.2024.00180(1366-1375)Online publication date: 2-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/COMPSAC61105.2024.00180
Wang ZMa CShen W(2024)Research on the Collaborative Mechanism of Project Robots in Online Knowledge Production Communities: An Analysis of GitHubCross-Cultural Design10.1007/978-3-031-60901-5_11(147-161)Online publication date: 29-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-60901-5_11
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

On the adoption of a TODO bot on GitHub: a preliminary study
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Management of computing and information systems
      1. Software management
        Software maintenance
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Collaboration in software development
      1. Open source model
    2. Software post-development issues
      1. Maintaining software
      2. Software version control
  2. Software notations and tools
    1. Software configuration management and version control systems
    2. Software maintenance tools

Index terms have been assigned to the content through auto-classification.

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

BotSE '22: Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Bots in Software Engineering

May 2022

41 pages

ISBN:9781450393331

DOI:10.1145/3528228

Conference Chair:
Mairieli Wessel
Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

Copyright © 2022 ACM.

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 the author(s) 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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Published: 26 October 2022

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ICSE '22: 44th International Conference on Software Engineering

May 9, 2022

Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh

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2025 IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering

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Cited By

Wang HGao ZBi TGrundy JWang XWu MYang X(2024)What Makes a Good TODO Comment?ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/366481133:6(1-30)Online publication date: 28-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3664811
Zhang JWu XZhang YXu SPeng M(2024)Enhancing Collaborative Software Development: A Deep Learning Approach for Bot Recommendation2024 IEEE 48th Annual Computers, Software, and Applications Conference (COMPSAC)10.1109/COMPSAC61105.2024.00180(1366-1375)Online publication date: 2-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/COMPSAC61105.2024.00180
Wang ZMa CShen W(2024)Research on the Collaborative Mechanism of Project Robots in Online Knowledge Production Communities: An Analysis of GitHubCross-Cultural Design10.1007/978-3-031-60901-5_11(147-161)Online publication date: 29-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-60901-5_11
Liao ZHuang XZhang BWu JCheng Y(2023)BDGOA: A bot detection approach for GitHub OAuth AppsIntelligent and Converged Networks10.23919/ICN.2023.00064:3(181-197)Online publication date: Sep-2023
https://doi.org/10.23919/ICN.2023.0006
Melo de Araújo MCosta CFontão A(2023)Analysis of the Technical Debt of Software Projects Based on Merge Code CommentsProceedings of the 17th Brazilian Symposium on Software Components, Architectures, and Reuse10.1145/3622748.3622751(21-30)Online publication date: 25-Sep-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3622748.3622751
Mohayeji HAgaronian AConstantinou EZannone NSerebrenik A(2023)Investigating the Resolution of Vulnerable Dependencies with Dependabot Security Updates2023 IEEE/ACM 20th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR)10.1109/MSR59073.2023.00042(234-246)Online publication date: May-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/MSR59073.2023.00042
Florczyk S(2023)A Control Room Monitored Software Engineering Robot Working Fully Autonomously at High Speed2023 International Conference on Electrical, Computer and Energy Technologies (ICECET)10.1109/ICECET58911.2023.10389534(1-14)Online publication date: 16-Nov-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICECET58911.2023.10389534

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