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, practitioners are not able to fully benefit from software repositories due to the fact that they need special expertise and dedicated effort to mine their repositories. 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 in terms of answer accuracy, speed and usefulness. 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：使用机器人回答软件存储库中的问题

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，从业者无法完全从软件存储库中受益，因为他们需要特殊的专业知识和专门的努力来挖掘他们的存储库。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，使用机器人在回答准确性、速度和实用性方面取得了非常有希望的结果。我们的工作有可能通过显着降低进入门槛来改变 MSR 领域，使从软件存储库中提取有用信息就像与机器人聊天一样容易。