论文标题
机器人提交的探索性研究
An Exploratory Study of Bot Commits
论文作者
论文摘要
背景：机器人有助于自动化软件开发人员执行的许多任务，并广泛用于在各种社交编码平台中提交代码。目前，尚不清楚这些机器人执行和理解哪些类型的活动可能有助于设计更好的机器人，并找到可能受益于机器人采用的应用领域。目的：我们旨在按更改类型（添加，删除或修改的文件）对机器人进行分类，找到更常见的文件类型，并确定倾向于更新在一起的文件类型的组。方法：检查了461个受欢迎的机器人（至少1000个提交）进行的12,326,137个提交，以识别提交添加/删除/修改的文件的频率和类型，并使用关联规则挖掘来确定修改的文件类型。结果：大多数机器人都会修改现有文件，其中一些添加了新文件，而文件的删除非常罕见。涉及多种操作的提交甚至更罕见。在添加，删除和修改的文件数方面，包含数据，配置和文档的文件最常更新，而HTML是最常见的类型。类型“ Markdown”，“忽略列表”，“ YAML”，“ JSON”的文件是与其他类型的文件一起更新的类型。结论：我们观察到大多数机器人犯罪涉及单个文件修改，并且机器人主要与数据，配置和文档文件一起使用。更好的理解是否是机器人的限制，如果克服会导致不同种类的机器人仍然是一个悬而未决的问题。
Background: Bots help automate many of the tasks performed by software developers and are widely used to commit code in various social coding platforms. At present, it is not clear what types of activities these bots perform and understanding it may help design better bots, and find application areas which might benefit from bot adoption. Aim: We aim to categorize the Bot Commits by the type of change (files added, deleted, or modified), find the more commonly changed file types, and identify the groups of file types that tend to get updated together. Method: 12,326,137 commits made by 461 popular bots (that made at least 1000 commits) were examined to identify the frequency and the type of files added/ deleted/ modified by the commits, and association rule mining was used to identify the types of files modified together. Result: Majority of the bot commits modify an existing file, a few of them add new files, while deletion of a file is very rare. Commits involving more than one type of operation are even rarer. Files containing data, configuration, and documentation are most frequently updated, while HTML is the most common type in terms of the number of files added, deleted, and modified. Files of the type "Markdown", "Ignore List", "YAML", "JSON" were the types that are updated together with other types of files most frequently. Conclusion: We observe that majority of bot commits involve single file modifications, and bots primarily work with data, configuration, and documentation files. A better understanding if this is a limitation of the bots and, if overcome, would lead to different kinds of bots remains an open question.
