Robin: A Voice Controlled Virtual Teammate for Software Developers and Teams

Software developers typically collaborate while relying on source code management tools and platforms such as Git and GitHub, which involve process workflow and issue-tracking, for development and maintenance of software-intensive solutions. Developers may lose concentration and productivity when having to navigate through numerous screens to perform daily tasks, which are oftentimes too repetitive, such as applying labels and assigning members to issues, finding who has open pull requests (and how many), closing issues/branches/pull requests, finding open issues, to name a few. Therefore, we hypothesize that current tools need to be improved to increase the developer and team experience and productivity in software projects. Consequently, we have developed Robin, a voice-controlled virtual teammate, to assist developers and teams on projects that strongly rely on source code control and issue tracking. In this short paper, we provide an overview of related work, some design decisions we have made, and insights for the road ahead.