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How to Find My Task? Chatbot to Assist Newcomers in Choosing Tasks in OSS Projects

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Chatbot Research and Design (CONVERSATIONS 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 13171))

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Abstract

Open Source Software (OSS) is making a meteoric rise in the software industry since several big companies have entered this market. Unfortunately, newcomers enter these projects and usually lose interest in contributing because of several factors. This paper aims to reduce the problems users face when they walk their first steps into OSS projects: finding the appropriate task. This paper presents a chatbot that filters tasks to help newcomers choose a task that fits their skills. We performed a quantitative and a qualitative study comparing the chatbot with the current GitHub issue tracker interface, which uses labels to categorize and identify tasks. The results show that users perceived the chatbot as easier to use than the GitHub issue tracker. Additionally, users tend to interpret the use of chatbots as situational, helping mainly newcomers and inexperienced contributors.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://botlist.co/.

  2. 2.

    Social Coding Platform, available at https://github.com.

  3. 3.

    https://cloud.ibm.com/catalog/services/watson-assistant.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Universidade Tecnológica Federal do Paraná, Campo Mourão, Paraná, Brazil

    Luiz Philipe Serrano Alves, Igor Scaliante Wiese, Ana Paula Chaves & Igor Steinmacher

Authors
  1. Luiz Philipe Serrano Alves
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  2. Igor Scaliante Wiese
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  3. Ana Paula Chaves
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  4. Igor Steinmacher
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Igor Steinmacher .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. SINTEF, Oslo, Norway

    Asbjørn Følstad

  2. VU Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Theo Araujo

  3. CERTH-ITI, Thessaloniki, Greece

    Symeon Papadopoulos

  4. Durham University, Durham, UK

    Effie L.-C. Law

  5. University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

    Ewa Luger

  6. Center for Artificial Intelligence Research, University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway

    Morten Goodwin

  7. University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Petter Bae Brandtzaeg

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Serrano Alves, L.P., Wiese, I.S., Chaves, A.P., Steinmacher, I. (2022). How to Find My Task? Chatbot to Assist Newcomers in Choosing Tasks in OSS Projects. In: Følstad, A., et al. Chatbot Research and Design. CONVERSATIONS 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13171. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94890-0_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94890-0_6

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