A Preliminary Study of Bots Usage in Open Source Community

Bots are seen as a promising approach in software development, which help to deal with the ever-increasing complexity of modern software engineering and development. The number of bots in open source community, such as GitHub, has expanded substantially over the last three years. Due to its increasing popularity, it is essential to characterize the current usage of bots in practices. In this paper, we present an empirical study of bots usage in GitHub community. By analyzing 7,399 projects from GitHub, we find that 4,148 (56%) projects have used bots. Through automatic identification and manual detection, we collect a total of 196 bots. We then analyze and classify them into 4 categories and 14 topics. Finally, we discuss some raised implications for bots in current GitHub community.