A Paradigm Shift in Automating Software Engineering Tasks: Bots

Increasing developer productivity and improving software quality are enduring challenges in software engineering. Addressing these challenges has influenced research toward improved automation and formalisms to realize software development tasks, along the way seeking for disruptive ways to support software developers. The past 55 years of software engineering has seen a number of paradigm shifts, fundamental changes in our underlying assumptions which led to making some progress in developing better quality software and disruptive improvements. For example, agile and lean software development approaches challenged our assumptions about the way software development tasks are orchestrated and communicated. Agile and lean software development philosophies advocate elimination of waste by emphasizing value-added tasks and encouraging improved understanding of what tasks stay in inventory.1 Embracing agile and lean software development approaches with discipline led software engineers to prioritize software engineering activities with a bias towards visible delivery, most often leading to improved software quality and developer well being when done right.