# Perception and Acceptance of an Autonomous Refactoring Bot

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.02553 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.02553/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 8 Jan 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Motivations, Challenges, Best Practices, and Benefits for Bots and Conversational Agents in Software Engineering: A Multivocal Literature Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11864/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The use of autonomous bots for automatic support in software development tasks is increasing. In the past, however, they were not always perceived positively and sometimes experienced a negative bias compared to their human counterparts. We conducted a qualitative study in which we deployed an autonomous refactoring bot for 41 days in a student software development project. In between and at the end, we conducted semi-structured interviews to find out how developers perceive the bot and whether they are more or less critical when reviewing the contributions of a bot compared to human contributions. Our findings show that the bot was perceived as a useful and unobtrusive contributor, and developers were no more critical of it than they were about their human colleagues, but only a few team members felt responsible for the bot.