Autonomy Is An Acquired Taste: Exploring Developer Preferences for GitHub Bots

Software bots are an important part of software development, and the rise of AI-based code tools will make them even more important. Software bots can do many tasks, and can exhibit a range of interaction behaviors in a project.  But in order for the bot to be effective, it must be accepted by the developers and project community with which the bot interacts.  The main purpose of this study is to enumerate some of these factors, and to explain what leads to perceived bad behavior in the context of a bot's autonomous actions and persona. We find developers prefer bots which are personable but show little autonomy. This dataset contains the replication package of the study. For Phase I, we shared the full and detailed interview guide, anonymized interview transcripts, and the result of the data analysis, i.e., codebook. For Phase II, the survey design and data.