Developers' Perception of GitHub Actions: A Survey Analysis

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ID: 282438
2023
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Abstract
GitHub introduced "Actions" in 2019 to increase workflow velocity and add customized automation to the repositories. Any individual can develop Actions for automating workflow on GitHub repositories and others can reuse them whenever open source. GitHub introduced its marketplace for commercializing and sharing these automation tools, which currently hosts 16,730 Actions. Yet, there are numerous Actions that are developed and distributed in local repositories and outside the Marketplace. So far, the research community conducted mining studies to understand Actions with a significant focus on CI/CD. We conducted a survey study with 90 Action developers and users to understand the motivations and best practices in using, developing, and debugging Actions, and the challenges associated with these tasks. We found that developers prefer Actions with verified creators and more stars when choosing between similar Actions, and often switch to an alternative Action when facing bugs or a lack of documentation. 60.87% of the developers consider the composition of YAML files, which are essential for Action integration, challenging and error-prone. They mainly check Q\&A forums to fix issues with these YAML files. Finally, developers tend to avoid using Actions (and hence automation) to reduce complexity, and security risk, or when the benefits of Actions are not worth the cost/effort of setting up Actions for automation.
Reference Key
nayebi2023developers Use this key to autocite in the manuscript while using SciMatic Manuscript Manager or Thesis Manager
Authors Sk Golam Saroar; Maleknaz Nayebi
Journal arXiv
Year 2023
DOI
DOI not found
URL
http://arxiv.org/abs/2303.04084v1
Keywords
cs.se

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