Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

11-2023

Abstract

Software projects frequently use automation tools to perform repetitive activities in the distributed software development process. Recently, GitHub introduced GitHub Actions, a feature providing automated workflows for software projects. Understanding and anticipating the effects of adopting such technology is important for planning and management. Our research investigates how projects use GitHub Actions, what the developers discuss about them, and how project activity indicators change after their adoption. Our results indicate that 1,489 out of 5,000 most popular repositories (almost 30% of our sample) adopt GitHub Actions and that developers frequently ask for help implementing them. Our findings also suggest that the adoption of GitHub Actions leads to more rejections of pull requests (PRs), more communication in accepted PRs and less communication in rejected PRs, fewer commits in accepted PRs and more commits in rejected PRs, and more time to accept a PR. We found similar results when segmenting our results by categories of GitHub Actions. We suggest practitioners consider these effects when adopting GitHub Actions on their projects.

Keywords

GitHub actions, Bots, Automated workflow, Software repositories, Regression discontinuity design

Discipline

Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

Empirical Software Engineering

Volume

28

Issue

6

First Page

1

Last Page

35

ISSN

1382-3256

Identifier

10.1007/s10664-023-10369-w

Publisher

Springer

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-023-10369-w

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