Emad Shihab (Concordia University) and me are bringing together the international community working on using bots in software engineering for the first time.
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, research, experience report and position papers. Research papers are expected to describe new research results and make contributions to the body knowledge in the area. 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. Position papers are expected to discuss controversial issues in the field, or describe interesting or thought provoking ideas that are not yet fully developed. Papers will be reviewed by at least three program committee members. Accepted research and experience report papers will be invited to give a talk to present their findings. Authors of accepted position papers will be invited to give a short lightning talk. Papers 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 and quality of software systems
Using bots to support software system release and deployment
Using bots to enhance and support testing & maintenance of software systems
Supporting and answering developer questions using bots
Using bots to ensure the safety, security, privacy and trustworthiness of software systems
Effective processes for the development of bot-based software
Privacy and ethics issues related to the use of bots in software systems
Issues in the interaction of bots and developers and other stakeholders
Experiences using bot frameworks in software systems
Submission information and more details can be found on the workshop page.