MSRBot: Using Bots to Answer Questions from Software Repositories
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Software repositories contain a plethora of useful information that can be used to enhance software projects. Prior work has leveraged repository data to improve many aspects of the software development process, such as, help extract requirement decisions, identify potentially defective code and improve maintenance and evolution. However, in many cases, practitioners are not able to fully benefit from software repositories due to the fact that they need special expertise and dedicated effort to mine their repositories. Therefore, in this paper, we use bots to automate and ease the process of extracting useful information from software repositories. Particularly, we lay out an approach of how bots, layered on top of software repositories, can be used to answer some of the most common software development/maintenance questions facing developers. We perform a preliminary study with 12 participants to validate the effectiveness of the bot. Our findings indicate that using bots achieves very promising results in terms of answer accuracy, speed and usefulness. Our work has the potential to transform the MSR field by significantly lowering the barrier to entry, making the extraction of useful information from software repositories as easy as chatting with a bot.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.015 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".