Developers’ Perception of GitHub Actions: A Survey Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
GitHub Actions is a powerful tool for automating workflows on GitHub repositories, with thousands of Actions currently available on the GitHub Marketplace. So far, the research community has conducted mining studies on Actions, with much of the focus on CI/CD. However, the motivation and best practices of developers for using, developing, and debugging Actions are unknown. To address this gap, we conducted a survey study with 90 Action users and developers. Our findings indicate that developers prefer Actions with verified creators and more stars when choosing between similar Actions, and often switch to alternative Actions when faced with bugs or a lack of documentation. We also found that developers find the composition of YAML files, which are essential for Action integration, challenging and error-prone. They primarily rely on Q&A forums to fix issues with these YAML files. Finally, we observed that developers would not likely adopt Actions when there are concerns around complexity and security risks. Our study summarizes developers’ perceptions, decision-making process, and challenges in using, developing, and debugging Actions. We provide recommendations for improving the visibility, re-usability, documentation, and support surrounding GitHub Actions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.035 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".