Agent-Based Automation of Collaborative Software Development: Current Status and Future Prospects

In this presentation I present the current state of using development bots, automated agents that aid during the collaborative software development process in social coding platforms like GitHub. Such agents are frequently being used for helping development teams in CI/CD automation, improving quality, increasing productivity, and releasing new releases more rapidly. Typical automation examples are dependency updating, review assistance, quality analysis, security scanning, reducing workload, helping newcomers and many more. I reflect on how the emergence of AI-based solutions is changing this automation, discuss the threats and risks of using such solutions, and discuss about mitigation strategies to overcome these threats and risks.