International Workshop on Bots in Software Engineering (BotSE)

Bots (short for software robots) are software applications that perform often repetitive or simple tasks. In particular, social and chatbots 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 argues 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. The workshop aims to provide a platform for software engineering researchers and practitioners to explore the potential of bots in enhancing productivity and efficiency in software development. The primary goals include:

• Discussing Opportunities: Identifying how bots can support various software engineering activities, such as code reviews, testing, project management, and communication within teams.
• Addressing Challenges: Highlighting the challenges associated with the use of bots, including trust, integration with existing workflows, user acceptance, and the technical limitations of current bot technologies. The workshop will facilitate discussions on overcoming these barriers to maximize the benefits of bots in software engineering.
• Fostering Collaboration: Creating an environment for networking and collaboration among attendees, encouraging the exchange of ideas, best practices, and experiences related to the design, deployment, and evaluation of bots in real-world software development settings.
• Setting Future Directions: Identifying gaps in current research and practice, and outlining future research directions to advance the use of bots in software engineering, ultimately aiming to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of software development processes.

Call for Papers

Bots (short for software robots) are software applications that perform often repetitive or simple tasks. In particular, social and chatbots 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 work in progress papers, position papers, and experience reports. Work in progress papers are expected to describe new research results and make contributions to the body knowledge in the area. Position papers are expected to discuss controversial issues in the field, or describe interesting or thought provoking ideas that are not yet fully developed. 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. All submissions will be reviewed by at least three program committee members. Accepted submissions will be invited to give a talk to present their findings. Submissions 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, quality, safety, security, privacy and trustworthiness of software systems
• Using bots to support software continuous integration, deployment and delivery
• Using bots to enhance and support software testing & maintenance
• Supporting and answering developer questions using bots
• Issues related to the use of, or research on, SE bots (e.g. privacy, ethical, human-computer interaction)
• Practical experiences in developing bots
• Experiences on using bot frameworks in software systems

How to Submit (adapted from ICSE)

Submissions should be made via easychair by the submission deadline.

Submission must not exceed 4 pages, including all text, figures, tables, and appendices; one additional page containing only references is permitted. Each submission must conform to the IEEE conference proceedings template, specified in the IEEE Conference Proceedings Formatting Guidelines (title in 24pt font and full text in 10pt type, LaTeX users must use \documentclass[10pt,conference]{IEEEtran} without including the compsoc or compsocconf options). For more information see here: https://www.ieee.org/conferences/publishing/templates.html

Proposal for lightning talks

We are soliciting presentation-only lightning talks.

Authors are asked to submit a short proposal that describes the main contributions of the lightning talk. Talk proposals should contain a brief abstract, place an emphasis on the motivation for the talk, and summarize contributions being presented. Proposals should not exceed 300 words and need to be submitted via easychair by the submission deadline.

All submitted abstracts will be peer-reviewed by members of the Programme Committee based on the criteria mentioned above.