A Tool for the Definition and Deployment of Platform-Independent Bots on Open Source Projects
Authors
Ait A., Cánovas Izquierdo J.L., Cabot J.
Reference
SLE 2023 - Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Software Language Engineering, Co-located with: SPLASH 2023, pp. 214-219, 2023
Description
The development of Open Source Software (OSS) projects is a collaborative process that heavily relies on active contributions by passionate developers. Creating, retaining and nurturing an active community of developers is a challenging task; and finding the appropriate expertise to drive the development process is not always easy. To alleviate this situation, many OSS projects try to use bots to automate some development tasks, thus helping community developers to cope with the daily workload of their projects. However, the techniques and support for developing bots is specific to the code hosting platform where the project is being developed (e.g., GitHub or GitLab). Furthermore, there is no support for orchestrating bots deployed in different platforms nor for building bots that go beyond pure development activities. In this paper, we propose a tool to define and deploy bots for OSS projects, which besides automation tasks they offer a more social facet, improving community interactions. The tool includes a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) which allows defining bots that can be deployed on top of several platforms and that can be triggered by different events (e.g., creation of a new issue or a pull request). We describe the design and the implementation of the tool, and illustrate its use with examples.
