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GitHub natively supports workflow automation through GitHub Actions. Yet, workflow maintenance is often considered a burden for software developers, who frequently face difficulties in writing, testing, debugging, and maintaining workflows.…

CI/CD practices play a significant role during collaborative software development by automating time-consuming and repetitive tasks such as testing, building, quality checking, dependency and security management. GitHub Actions, the CI/CD…

The demand for quick and reliable DevOps operations pushed distributors of repository platforms to implement workflows. Workflows allow automating code management operations directly on the repository hosting the software. However, this…

Continuous Integration (CI) has evolved from a tooling strategy to a fundamental mindset in modern CI engineering. It enables teams to develop, test, and deliver software rapidly and collaboratively. Among CI services, GitHub Actions (GHA)…

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…

Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) have become fundamental to modern software development, with GitHub Actions (GHA) emerging as a dominant automation platform. In this study, we analyze real-world execution records of…

Developers often struggle with maintaining GitHub Actions workflow configurations in GitHub-hosted repositories, with recent studies showing frequent execution failures. This paper empirically explores how the adoption and evolution of…

Large-scale software development has become a highly collaborative and geographically distributed endeavour, especially in open-source software development ecosystems and their associated developer communities. It has given rise to modern…

Context: GitHub hosts an impressive number of high-quality OSS projects. However, selecting "the right tool for the job" is a challenging task, because we do not have precise information about those high-quality projects. Objective: In this…

GitHub Actions (GHA) CI workflows are critical infrastructure, but current tooling offers only syntactic or heuristic checks and does not enforce documented best practices for security, maintainability, or performance. Consequently, issues…

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.…

The ever-increasing complexity of modern software engineering projects makes the usage of automated assistants imperative. Bots can be used to complete repetitive tasks during development and testing, as well as promoting communication…

GitHub, renowned for facilitating collaborative code version control and software production in software teams, expanded its services in 2017 by introducing GitHub Marketplace. This online platform hosts automation tools to assist…

Background: Open source software has an increasing importance in modern software development. However, there is also a growing concern on the sustainability of such projects, which are usually managed by a small number of developers,…

Generative AI technologies promise to transform the product development lifecycle. This study evaluates the efficiency gains, areas for improvement, and emerging challenges of using GitHub Copilot, an AI-powered coding assistant. We…

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…

[Context] AI assistants, like GitHub Copilot and Cursor, are transforming software engineering. While several studies highlight productivity improvements, their impact on maintainability requires further investigation. [Objective] This…

[Background/Context] AI assistants like GitHub Copilot are transforming software engineering; several studies have highlighted productivity improvements. However, their impact on code quality, particularly in terms of maintainability,…

Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) caching is widely used to reduce repeated computation and improve CI/CD efficiency, yet maintaining effective caching requires ongoing maintenance effort. In this paper, we present the…

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…