  The use of autonomous bots for automatic support in software development
tasks is increasing. In the past, however, they were not always perceived
positively and sometimes experienced a negative bias compared to their human
counterparts. We conducted a qualitative study in which we deployed an
autonomous refactoring bot for 41 days in a student software development
project. In between and at the end, we conducted semi-structured interviews to
find out how developers perceive the bot and whether they are more or less
critical when reviewing the contributions of a bot compared to human
contributions. Our findings show that the bot was perceived as a useful and
unobtrusive contributor, and developers were no more critical of it than they
were about their human colleagues, but only a few team members felt responsible
for the bot.
