Related papers: How Do Software Developers Use GitHub Actions to A…

As a maintainer of an open source software project, you are usually happy about contributions in the form of pull requests that bring the project a step forward. Past studies have shown that when reviewing a pull request, not only its…

In the GitHub ecosystem, workflows are used as an effective means to automate development tasks and to set up a Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD pipeline). GitHub Actions (GHA) have been conceived to provide developers with a…

GitHub is the most popular repository for open source code. It has more than 3.5 million users, as the company declared in April 2013, and more than 10 million repositories, as of December 2013. It has a publicly accessible API and, since…

Peer code reviews are crucial for maintaining the quality of the code in software repositories. Developers have introduced a number of software bots to help with the code review process. Despite the benefits of automating code review tasks,…

Commit signing is a principal mechanism for verifying the origin of code in software supply chains. Security frameworks treat it as a core trust signal, assuming developers sign their commits consistently with keys they control and keep…

Open-source developers, particularly the elite developers, maintain a diverse portfolio of contributing activities. They do not only commit source code but also spend a significant amount of effort on other communicative, organizational,…

Recently, GitHub introduced a new social feature, named reactions, which are "pictorial characters" similar to emoji symbols widely used nowadays in text-based communications. Particularly, GitHub users can use a pre-defined set of such…

For teams using distributed version control systems, the right collaborative development workflows can help maintaining the long-term quality of project repositories and improving work efficiency. Despite the fact that the workflows are…

This study examines the impact of GitHub Copilot on a large sample of Copilot users (n=934,533). The analysis shows that users on average accept nearly 30% of the suggested code, leading to increased productivity. Furthermore, our research…

The availability of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT or GitHub Copilot is reshaping the way in which software is developed, evolved, and maintained. Oftentimes, developers leave traces of such an usage in…

GitHub Marketplace is expanding by approximately 41% annually, with new tools; however, many additions replicate existing functionality. We study this phenomenon in the platform's largest segment, Continuous Integration (CI), by linking…

Blockchain is a distributed ledger technique that guarantees the traceability of transactions. Blockchain is adopted in multiple domains like finance (e.g., cryptocurrency), healthcare, security, and supply chain. In the open-source…

Autonomous coding agents increasingly contribute to software development by submitting pull requests on GitHub; yet, little is known about how these contributions integrate into human-driven review workflows. We present a large empirical…

In 2017, GitHub was the first online open source platform to show security alerts to its users. It has since introduced further security interventions to help developers improve the security of their open source software. In this study, we…

GitHub, a central hub for collaborative software development, has revolutionized the open-source software (OSS) ecosystem through its GitHub Marketplace, a platform launched in 2017 to host automation tools aimed at enhancing the efficiency…

Generative AI tools hold promise to increase human productivity. This paper presents results from a controlled experiment with GitHub Copilot, an AI pair programmer. Recruited software developers were asked to implement an HTTP server in…

Our goal is to understand the characteristics of high-performing teams on GitHub. Towards this end, we collect data from software repositories and evaluate teams by examining differences in productivity. Our study focuses on the team…

Automating software development processes through the orchestration of GitHub Action workflows has revolutionized the efficiency and agility of software delivery pipelines. This paper presents a detailed investigation into the use of Large…

GitHub Actions (GA) has become the de facto tool that developers use to automate software workflows, seamlessly building, testing, and deploying code. Yet when GA fails, it disrupts development, causing delays and driving up costs.…

Software quality is an important problem for technology companies, since it substantially impacts the efficiency, usefulness, and maintainability of the final product; hence, code review is a must-do activity for software developers. During…