  Software repositories contain a plethora of useful information that can be
used to enhance software projects. Prior work has leveraged repository data to
improve many aspects of the software development process, such as, help extract
requirement decisions, identify potentially defective code and improve
maintenance and evolution. However, in many cases, practitioners are not able
to fully benefit from software repositories due to the fact that they need
special expertise and dedicated effort to mine their repositories.
  Therefore, in this paper, we use bots to automate and ease the process of
extracting useful information from software repositories. Particularly, we lay
out an approach of how bots, layered on top of software repositories, can be
used to answer some of the most common software development/maintenance
questions facing developers. We perform a preliminary study with 12
participants to validate the effectiveness of the bot. Our findings indicate
that using bots achieves very promising results in terms of answer accuracy,
speed and usefulness. Our work has the potential to transform the MSR field by
significantly lowering the barrier to entry, making the extraction of useful
information from software repositories as easy as chatting with a bot.
