Software repositories contain a plethora of useful information that can be used to enhance software projects. Prior work has leveraged repository data to improve many aspects of the software development process, such as, help extract requirement decisions, identify potentially defective code and improve maintenance and evolution. However, in many cases, project stakeholders are not able to fully benefit from their software repositories due to the fact that they need special expertise to mine their repositories. Also, extracting and linking data from different types of repositories (e.g., source code control and bug repositories) requires dedicated effort and time, even if the stakeholder has the expertise to perform such a task. Therefore, in this paper, we use bots to automate and ease the process of extracting useful information from software repositories. Particularly, we lay out an approach of how bots, layered on top of software repositories, can be used to answer some of the most common software development/maintenance questions facing developers. We perform a preliminary study with 12 participants to validate the effectiveness of the bot. Our findings indicate that using bots achieves very promising results compared to not using the bot (baseline). Most of the participants (90.0%) find the bot to be either useful or very useful. Also, they completed 90.8% of the tasks correctly using the bot with a median time of 40 seconds per task. On the other hand, without the bot, the participants completed 25.2% of the tasks with a median time of 240 seconds per task. Our work has the potential to transform the MSR field by significantly lowering the barrier to entry, making the extraction of useful information from software repositories as easy as chatting with a bot.

中文翻译：

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MSRBot：使用机器人回答来自软件存储库的问题

软件存储库包含大量可用于增强软件项目的有用信息。之前的工作利用存储库数据来改进软件开发过程的许多方面，例如，帮助提取需求决策、识别潜在的缺陷代码以及改进维护和进化。然而，在许多情况下，项目利益相关者无法从他们的软件存储库中完全受益，因为他们需要特殊的专业知识来挖掘他们的存储库。此外，从不同类型的存储库（例如，源代码控制和错误存储库）提取和链接数据需要专门的努力和时间，即使涉众具有执行此类任务的专业知识。因此，在本文中，我们使用机器人来自动化和简化从软件存储库中提取有用信息的过程。特别是，我们提出了一种方法，说明如何使用位于软件存储库之上的机器人来回答开发人员面临的一些最常见的软件开发/维护问题。我们对 12 名参与者进行了初步研究，以验证机器人的有效性。我们的研究结果表明，与不使用机器人（基线）相比，使用机器人取得了非常有希望的结果。大多数参与者 (90.0%) 发现机器人有用或非常有用。此外，他们使用机器人正确完成了 90.8% 的任务，每个任务的平均时间为 40 秒。另一方面，在没有机器人的情况下，参与者完成了 25.2% 的任务，每个任务的中位时间为 240 秒。