Both recommender systems and bots should proactively and smartly answer the questions of software developers or other project stakeholders to assist them in performing their tasks more efficiently. This paper reflects on the achievements from the more mature area of Recommendation Systems in Software Engineering (RSSE) as well as the rising area of Bots in Software Engineering (BotSE). We discuss the similarities and differences, briefly review current state of the art, and highlight three particular areas, in which the full potential is yet to be tapped: a more socio-technical context awareness, assisting knowledge sharing in addition to knowledge access, as well as covering repetitive or stimulative scenarios related to requirements and user-developer interaction.

Walid Maalej is an award-wining software researcher, passionate educator, and creative handyman. As Professor of Informatics at the University of Hamburg in Germany he teaches software development basics to 500-700 students using fun activities and pair-programming. His advanced software engineering courses often include a big portion of Data, Machine Learning, and Empiricism and are based on real challenges from industry and society. Prof. Maalej was named earlier “The Early Stage Scientist of the Year” by academics and the German Association of University Professors (DHV). His work was cited thousands of times and received a.o. the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award, IEEE RE Best Paper Award, MSR Most Influential Paper Award, as well as Awards by Google and Microsoft. Prof. Maalej worked as developer, manager, and consultant for numerous companies and organizations including Siemens, Tata Consultancy Services, Rohde und Schwarz, and Telekom. He received his doctoral decree from TU Munich with distinction and is also a proud alumni of the Center for Digital Technology and Management.