Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

5-2021

Abstract

Automated tools are frequently used in social coding repositories to perform repetitive activities that are part of the distributed software development process. Recently, GitHub introduced GitHub Actions, a feature providing automated work-flows for repository maintainers. Although several Actions have been built and used by practitioners, relatively little has been done to evaluate them. Understanding and anticipating the effects of adopting such kind of technology is important for planning and management. Our research is the first to investigate how developers use Actions and how several activity indicators change after their adoption. Our results indicate that, although only a small subset of repositories adopted GitHub Actions to date, there is a positive perception of the technology. Our findings also indicate that the adoption of GitHub Actions increases the number of monthly rejected pull requests and decreases the monthly number of commits on merged pull requests. These results are especially relevant for practitioners to understand and prevent undesirable effects on their projects.

Keywords

Automated work-flow, GitHub Actions, GitHub Bots, Regression Discontinuity Design

Discipline

Databases and Information Systems | Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

Proceedings of the 2021 IEEE/ACM 18th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR), Virtual Conference, May 17-19

First Page

420

Last Page

431

ISBN

9781728187105

Identifier

10.1109/MSR52588.2021.00054

Publisher

IEEE

City or Country

Piscataway, NJ

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1109/MSR52588.2021.00054

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