Abstract

Modern Software Engineering thrives with innovative tools that aid developers in creating better software grounded on quality standards. Software bots are an emerging and exciting trend in this regard, supporting numerous software development activities. As an emerging trend, few studies describe and analyze different bots in software development. This research presents a systematic literature review covering the state of the art of applied and proposed bots for software development. Our study spans literature from 2003 to 2022, with 82 different bots applied in software development activities, covering 83 primary studies. We found four bot archetypes: chatbots which focus on direct communication with developers to aid them, analysis bots that display helpful information in different tasks, repair bots for resolving software defects, and development bots that combine aspects of other bot technologies to provide a service to the developer. The primary benefits of using bots are increasing software quality, providing useful information to developers, and saving time through the partial or total automation of development activities. However, drawbacks are reported, including limited effectiveness in task completion, high coupling to third-party technologies, and some prejudice from developers toward bots and their contributions. We discovered that including Bots in software development is a promising field of research in software engineering that has yet to be fully explored.

中文翻译：

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软件开发中的机器人：系统文献综述和主题分析

摘要

现代软件工程凭借创新工具蓬勃发展，帮助开发人员基于质量标准创建更好的软件。软件机器人是这方面一个新兴的、令人兴奋的趋势，支持众多的软件开发活动。作为一种新兴趋势，很少有研究描述和分析软件开发中的不同机器人。这项研究提出了系统的文献综述，涵盖了软件开发中应用和提议的机器人的最新技术。我们的研究跨越 2003 年至 2022 年的文献，在软件开发活动中应用了 82 个不同的机器人，涵盖了 83 项初步研究。我们发现了四种机器人原型：专注于与开发人员直接沟通以帮助他们的聊天机器人、在不同任务中显示有用信息的分析机器人、用于解决软件缺陷的修复机器人以及结合其他机器人技术的各个方面来提供服务的开发机器人。开发商。使用机器人的主要好处是提高软件质量，为开发人员提供有用的信息，并通过开发活动的部分或全部自动化来节省时间。然而，也存在一些缺点，包括任务完成效率有限、与第三方技术的高度耦合以及开发人员对机器人及其贡献的一些偏见。我们发现，将机器人纳入软件开发是软件工程中一个有前途的研究领域，但尚未得到充分探索。