  Software bots are used to streamline tasks in Open Source Software (OSS)
projects' pull requests, saving development cost, time, and effort. However,
their presence can be disruptive to the community. We identified several
challenges caused by bots in pull request interactions by interviewing 21
practitioners, including project maintainers, contributors, and bot developers.
In particular, our findings indicate noise as a recurrent and central problem.
Noise affects both human communication and development workflow by overwhelming
and distracting developers. Our main contribution is a theory of how human
developers perceive annoying bot behaviors as noise on social coding platforms.
This contribution may help practitioners understand the effects of adopting a
bot, and researchers and tool designers may leverage our results to better
support human-bot interaction on social coding platforms.
