BOSS: Smart Bots for (Open Source) Software Development – TED Spanish National Project 2023-2024
Software is the underlying infrastructure powering this transformation, and therefore it is critical for the daily activities and future evolution of our society. Most critical software is built as Open Source Software (OSS) or heavily relies on it. As a consequence, it is fair to say that OSS plays a significant role in the European Software economy, with digital businesses built by leveraging Open Source assets. The promise of OSS is better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility and lower cost. However, it suffers from problems such as the tragedy of the commons: everybody uses OSS but very few contribute back. As such, our digital infrastructure stands on shaky grounds, with critical software facing deep sustainability risks. These issues affect companies and public entities and hamper the potential benefits derived from this ongoing digital transition.
This project proposes for a radical shift in the way software is developed and maintained based on a self-guiding swarm of smart software bots to assist projects owners, developers but also occasional contributors and community members in all their software-related tasks. Bots will be trained using a variety of AI techniques, including machine learning models derived from a curated collection of software project data in code hosting platforms like GitHub.
The main goal of the project is Building, One Bot at a Time, a Unified Framework for Sustainable Software Development. More specifically, it aims to transform software development by providing a framework to model, generate, personalize, combine and coordinate smart software bots to help in all phases of software development and maintenance.
This overall objective will be met by way of achieving the following subgoals:
- Building and training models from software historical data.
- Defining languages to build and generate a smart bot infrastructure able to monitor and participate in software development, including the capability to communicate in Natural Language with the project community.
- Enabling effective collaboration and cooperation among all smart bots deployed in the same project.
- Providing guidelines and a library of prepackaged bots to facilitate the immediate adoption of BOSS in all kinds of public and private companies.
The results of this project will have a significant social, scientific and economic impact:
- Social impact: empowering end users and speeding up the digital transition of our society. It will facilitate the participation of all types of users, in the evolution of any software project, which is especially important in the current context of transparency and participatory initiatives in the public administration.
- Scientific impact: transforming software development, as the techniques developed will evolve the way that software projects are built and maintained, maximizing their chances of success.
- Economic impact: providing competitive advantages to national companies and help them to be more agile. Another key long-term impact of the project should be to help other research projects to advance faster by developing a series of artifacts useful to other researcher teams working in this same area.