6th International Workshop on
Bots in Software Engineering

Ottawa, Canada
In conjunction with ICSE 2025

April 27, 2025


Keynote Speaker

Suhaib Mujahid

Suhaib Mujahid is a Staff Machine Learning Engineer at Mozilla. In his role, he leads projects aimed at addressing software engineering challenges. He also focuses on bridging the gap between innovative research and practical software engineering processes. Dr. Mujahid received his PhD in software engineering from Concordia University (Canada) in 2021, where his focus was on Mining Software Repositories, Software Ecosystems, Release Engineering, and Machine Learning on Code.

Program

09:00 - 10:15 Opening and Keynote

  • 09:00 - 09:15 Opening

  • 09:15 - 10:15 Keynote

11:00 - 12:15 Session 1: Bots in Open Source and Development Practices

  • 11:00 - 11:15 Observing bots in the wild: A quantitative analysis of a large open-source ecosystem
    Natarajan Chidambaram and Tom Mens

  • 11:15 - 11:30 The Secret Life of Bots in Pull Requests: An Empirical Study based on Apache Projects
    Chenhao Wei, Lu Xiao, Yutong Zhao and Ting Liao

  • 11:30 - 11:45 A Bot Identification Model and Tool Based on GitHub Activity Sequences

  • 11:45 - 12:00 GZoltarAction: A Fault Localization Bot for GitHub Repositories
    Hugo Paiva, Jose Campos and Rui Abreu

  • 12:00 - 12:15 Opportunities and Challenges of Software Engineering Bots: A Forward-Looking Analysis
    Glaucia Melo


14:00 - 15:30 Session 2: Collaborative and Educational Use of Bots

  • 14:00 - 15:00 Panel Discussion

  • 15:00 - 15:15 Towards a Framework for Multi-Bot Collaboration
    Alberto Mimbrero, Jose A. Parejo, Pablo Fernandez, Miguel Romero-Arjona and Sergio Segura

  • 15:15 - 15:30 ResearchBot: Bridging the Gap between Academic Research and Practical Programming Communities
    Sahar Farzanehpour, Swetha Rajeev, Huayu Liang, Ritvik Prabhu and Chris Brown

  • 15:00 - 15:30 Supporting Brainstorming Activities with Bots in Software Engineering Education
    Juan Carlos Farah, Jeremy La Scala, Sandy Ingram and Denis Gillet


16:00 - 17:15 Session 3: Evaluating and Improving Bot Impact

  • 16:00 - 16:15 Towards a Newcomers Dataset to Assess Conversational Agent's Efficacy in Mentoring Newcomers
    Misan Etchie, Hunter Beach, Katia Felizardo and Igor Steinmacher

  • 16:15 - 16:30 Bot-Driven Development: From Simple Automation to Autonomous Software Development Bots
    Christoph Treude and Christopher M. Poskitt

  • 16:30 - 16:45 Bridging HCI and AI Research for the Evaluation of Conversational SE Assistants
    Jonan Richards and Mairieli Wessel

  • 16:45 - 17:00 Reducing Alert Fatigue via AI-Assisted Negotiation: A Case for Dependabot
    Raula Gaikovina Kula

17:00 - 17:15 Closing Ceremony

Call for Papers
International Workshop on Bots in Software Engineering
(BotSE)

Bots (short for software robots) are software applications that perform often repetitive or simple tasks. In particular, social and chat bots interacting with humans are a recent research topic. Similarly, bots can be used to automate many tasks that are performed by software practitioners and teams in their day-to-day work. Recent work argue that bots can save developers' time and significantly increase productivity. Therefore, the goal of this one-day workshop is to bring together software engineering researchers and practitioners to discuss the opportunities and challenges of bots in software engineering. We solicit 4-page work in progress papers, position papers, and experience reports. Work in progress papers are expected to describe new research results and make contributions to the body knowledge in the area. Position papers are expected to discuss controversial issues in the field, or describe interesting or thought provoking ideas that are not yet fully developed. Experience reports are expected to describe experiences with (amongst other things) the development, deployment, and maintenance of bot-based systems in the software engineering domain. All submissions will be reviewed by at least three program committee members. Accepted submissions will be invited to give a talk to present their findings. Submissions may address issues along the general themes, including but not limited, to the following topics:

  • Using bots to derive software requirements and documentation
  • Using bots in the context of the reliability, quality, safety, security, privacy and trustworthiness of software systems
  • Using bots to support software continuous integration, deployment and delivery
  • Using bots to enhance and support software testing & maintenance
  • Supporting and answering developer questions using bots
  • Issues related to the use of, or research on, SE bots (e.g. privacy, ethical, human-computer interaction)
  • Practical experiences in developing bots
  • Experiences on using bot frameworks in software systems

Accepted Papers

  • Bridging HCI and AI Research for the Evaluation of Conversational SE Assistants
    Jonan Richards and Mairieli Wessel
  • Towards a Newcomers Dataset to Assess Conversational Agent's Efficacy in Mentoring Newcomers
    Misan Etchie, Hunter Beach, Katia Felizardo, and Igor Steinmacher
  • The Secret Life of Bots in Pull Requests: An Empirical Study Based on Apache Projects
    Chenhao Wei, Lu Xiao, Yutong Zhao, and Ting Liao
  • Supporting Brainstorming Activities with Bots in Software Engineering Education
    Juan Carlos Farah, Jeremy La Scala, Sandy Ingram, and Denis Gillet
  • GZoltarAction: A Fault Localization Bot for GitHub Repositories
    Hugo Paiva, Jose Campos, and Rui Abreu
  • Towards a Framework for Multi-Bot Collaboration
    Alberto Mimbrero, Jose A. Parejo, Pablo Fernandez, Miguel Romero-Arjona, and Sergio Segura
  • Observing Bots in the Wild: A Quantitative Analysis of a Large Open Source Ecosystem
    Natarajan Chidambaram and Tom Mens
  • ResearchBot: Bridging the Gap Between Academic Research and Practical Programming Communities
    Sahar Farzanepour, Swetha Rajeev, Huayu Liang, Ritvik Prabhu, and Chris Brown

Important Dates

All deadlines are firm at the Anywhere on Earth (AoE):

  • Submission Deadline: 18 November 2024 (Updated)
  • Lightning talks submission deadline: 22 November 2024 (Updated)
  • Acceptance Notification: 1 December 2024
  • Camera Ready: 5 February 2025

How to Submit (adapted from ICSE)

Submissions should be made via easychair by the submission deadline.

Submission must not exceed 4 pages, including all text, figures, tables, and appendices; one additional page containing only references is permitted. Each submission must conform to the IEEE conference proceedings template, specified in the IEEE Conference Proceedings Formatting Guidelines (title in 24pt font and full text in 10pt type, LaTeX users must use \documentclass[10pt,conference]{IEEEtran} without including the compsoc or compsocconf options). For more information see here: https://www.ieee.org/conferences/publishing/templates.html

Proposal for lightning talks

We are soliciting presentation-only lightning talks.

Authors are asked to submit a short proposal that describes the main contributions of the lightning talk. Talk proposals should contain a brief abstract, place an emphasis on the motivation for the talk, and summarize contributions being presented. Proposals should not exceed 300 words and need to be submitted via easychair by the submission deadline.

All submitted abstracts will be peer-reviewed by members of the Programme Committee based on the criteria mentioned above.

Organization

Organizing Committee

  • Ahmad Abdellatif - University of Calgary
  • Marco A. Gerosa - Northern Arizona University
  • Emad Shihab - Concordia University

Web Chair

  • Shahed Issa - University of Calgary

Publicity Chair

  • Natarajan Chidambaram - University of Mons

Proceedings Chair

  • Ahmad Abdellatif - University of Calgary

Program Committee

  • Chris Brown, Virginia Tech, USA
  • Nathan Casee, TU Eindhoven, Netherlands
  • Diego Costa, Universite du Quebec a Montreal, Canada
  • Lorenzo De Carli, University of Calgary, Canada
  • Tapajit Dey, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
  • Ranim Khojah, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden
  • Qinghua Lu, Data61, CSIRO, Australia
  • Glaucia Melo, University of Waterloo, Canada
  • Tom Mens, University of Mons, Belgium
  • Nicole Novielli, University of Bari, Italy
  • Christoph Treude, Singapore Management University, Singapore
  • Akhila Venigalla, IIT Tirupati, India
  • Mairieli Wessel, Radboud University, Netherlands