GitHub Actions: The Impact on the Pull Request Process

M Wessel; J Vargovich; MA Gerosa; C Treude

Journal article

GitHub Actions: The Impact on the Pull Request Process

M Wessel, J Vargovich, MA Gerosa, C Treude

Empirical Software Engineering | SPRINGER | Published : 2023

DOI: 10.1007/s10664-023-10369-w

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. Ou..

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University of Melbourne Researchers

Christoph Treude Author

Related Projects (1)

Automatically summarising and measuring software development activity

Grants

Awarded by National Science Foundation

Funding Acknowledgements

This work was partially supported by the NSF grants 1815503, 1900903, 2236198, 2247929, 2303042, and the Australian Research Council's Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) funding scheme (DE180100153). We thank Timothy Kinsman for his participation in the initial stage of this study.