Marking 2016 as the year of chatbot is probably true as it has seen a number of exceptional technology taking shape for making developers job easy. As it was mentioned earlier that chatbots have benefitted a number of sectors including travel, retail, enterprises; it is sure to get more prominent in 2017. The innovative technology has seen the shifting from point-and -click based apps to chat-based user interfaces. Additionally, software development has also gone through this trend.
Chatops, is the term coined by GitHub in 2013 when it created its open source chatbot (Hubot) to help developers in their practices. Originally, it was designed to act as an integration for messaging apps like Campfire. Hubspot has been adopted by a number of companies as their influential workflow.
From both developers’ and consumers’ point of view, chat based platforms have got potential to integrate with more and more apps that offer the scope of embedding additional functionality. Developers in a number of communities have remained the most loyal adopters. From their point of view chatops are definitely the future of collaboration in developers team.
Here is more on what chatbots are and the future they hold for apps.
Chat, code, send
Chatops can easily be understood as established devops practices with instant messaging platform at a workplace. Devops, on the other hand, is a way of enhancing communication and cooperation between development and IT teams. The work of these teams involve instant messaging for work related issues and thus they are more likely to be using platforms such as HipChat that has third party native chatbots already.
Slack is another real-time messaging for a number of developers to engage in instant messaging. Because of the ease of the platform, many developers choose it in order to get their chat notifications when they have completed building a system. However, it is not much effective as developers still need to context switch besides slack to complete specific task, which of course slows down their speed.
Chatops provide a solution to this problem with the idea to allow developers to complete any specific task in the command line or in the slack only. It saves developers time and increases the development speed. In order to get the benefit, it is important to create closer integrations between the chat applications, development environment as well as infrastructure platform including AWS and Kubernetes. It thus allows customizing the bot to fit specific project needs.
Security
The overall security concerns of chatbot is a critical problem to keep into the mind. Chatbots are becoming crucial in the product development and thus the security needs to be prominent. To implement the same, the security levels of chatbot platforms must be advanced.
Hubot was the foremost chatbot to get released, it lacked a number of security concerns if compared with modern chatbots. Among the most recent bots that have extended the security features include Erbot, and Cog. however, Hubot offers inclusion of security feature by including middleware.
Middleware allows controlling functions that include role, room and the environment. It also allows clear log of audit requests and also the information that whether middleware is allowing the command to go through or not. In simpler words, it ensures that the chatbot is only accessing the information that is required and in case any suspicious behavior is detected it can conform the users of the same.
Conclusion
Bots have become very common in 2016 and the upcoming year is expected to see more innovation in the current technology. As the development technology is growing every single day, innovative technique is sure to take the bots world by storm. With the ongoing experiments, developers will have much more to work on and get benefitted with the use of chatbot creation.
As there is innovative technology at developer’s disposal, they are sure to become more agile with their operations and techniques of chatbot development. They will go more specific with the ability of deploying the code in order to create technique that could help in easy communicate through one integrated program. More innovation is sure to offer more room for developers to work on.
