Bots are software systems designed to support users by automating a specific process, task, or activity. When such systems implement a conversational component to interact with the users, they are also known as conversational agents. Bots, particularly in their conversation-oriented version and AI-powered, have seen their adoption increase over time for software development and engineering purposes. Despite their exciting potential, ulteriorly enhanced by the advent of Generative AI and Large Language Models, bots still need to be improved to develop and integrate into the development cycle since practitioners report that bots add additional challenges that may worsen rather than improve. In this work, we aim to provide a taxonomy for characterizing bots, as well as a series of challenges for their adoption for Software Engineering associated with potential mitigation strategies. To reach our objectives, we conducted a multivocal literature review, reviewing both research and practitioner's literature. Through such an approach, we hope to contribute to both researchers and practitioners by providing first, a series of future research routes to follow, second, a list of strategies to adopt for improving the use of bots for software engineering purposes, and third, enforce a technology and knowledge transfer from the research field to the practitioners one, that is one of the primary goal of multivocal literature reviews.

翻译：机器人是一种旨在通过自动化特定流程、任务或活动来支持用户的软件系统。当此类系统通过对话组件与用户交互时，亦被称为对话代理。机器人——特别是其对话导向版本及人工智能驱动型——在软件开发与工程领域的应用正日益广泛。尽管其潜力令人振奋，且生成式人工智能与大语言模型的出现进一步增强了这种潜力，但机器人仍需改进以适应开发周期并实现有效集成，因为从业者报告称机器人可能带来额外挑战，反而可能使情况恶化而非改善。本研究旨在构建机器人特征分类体系，并系统梳理其在软件工程领域应用所面临的挑战及潜在缓解策略。为实现目标，我们开展了多声部文献综述，综合考察了学术界与产业界的相关文献。通过这种方法，我们期望为研究者和从业者提供三方面贡献：首先，提出一系列可供遵循的未来研究方向；其次，列举改进软件工程领域机器人应用的策略清单；最后，推动从研究领域到产业实践的技术与知识转移——这正是多声部文献综述的核心目标之一。