Understanding the Impact of Bots on Developers Sentiment and Project Progress

Abstract

Software developers advance the project process by contributing and discussing on the code platform. Software bot acts as an assistant to help developers deal with repetitive tasks. In this paper, we explore whether the adoption of bots has an impact on developer sentiment and projects progress. We collected issues, pull requests and comments from GitHub popular projects. And we found that human users had significantly reduced positive sentiment in bot-created issues and PRs. The average merging time of the bot-created PRs is significantly shorter than human-created ones. The average solving time of bot-commented issues is significantly longer than human-created ones.