Software bots fulfill an important role in collective software development, and their adoption by developers promises increased productivity. Past research has identified that bots that communicate too often can irritate developers, which affects the utility of the bot. However, it is not clear what other properties of human-bot collaboration affect developers' preferences, or what impact these properties might have. The main idea of this paper is to explore characteristics affecting developer preferences for interactions between humans and bots, in the context of GitHub pull requests. We carried out an exploratory sequential study with interviews and a subsequent vignette-based survey. We find developers generally prefer bots that are personable but show little autonomy, however, more experienced developers tend to prefer more autonomous bots. Based on this empirical evidence, we recommend bot developers increase configuration options for bots so that individual developers and projects can configure bots to best align with their own preferences and project cultures.

翻译：软件机器人在集体软件开发中扮演着重要角色，开发人员对其采纳有望提升生产力。过往研究已指出，沟通过于频繁的机器人可能会激怒开发人员，从而影响其实用性。然而，人机协作的其他特性如何影响开发者的偏好，或这些特性可能产生何种影响，目前尚不明确。本文的核心思想是在GitHub拉取请求的背景下，探索影响开发者对人机交互偏好的特征。我们通过访谈及后续基于情境故事的调查进行了探索性序列研究。研究发现，开发人员普遍偏好具有亲和力但自主性较低的机器人，然而经验更丰富的开发者则倾向于更具自主性的机器人。基于这一实证证据，我们建议机器人开发人员增加配置选项，以便个体开发者和项目能够根据自身偏好与项目文化对机器人进行最佳配置。