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What I would like to present to you today are the implications of using GitHub Actions as Mike

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mentioned and how to avoid unexpected effects on your development workflow and group dynamics.

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So historically there is a lot of manual work that has been automatically - automatically detected,

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and that has been automated - sorry - by automation workflows tools also for software bots

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and continuous integration tools, and recently GitHub also introduced it to help during this

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process of automating issues and pull request workflows has introduced it, so GitHub Actions.

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And we all probably know what a GitHub action is, but what we don't know, and what we don't

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understand, is what it does, and what are the implications of using it on your project,

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in your repositories. So basically GitHub Actions was created to automate

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tasks based on various triggers. For example, the creation of a new branch,

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or comments, pull requests, and also comments on these requests and comments,

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and it can be easily shared from one repository to another making it easier to automate how we build,

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test, and deploy software projects. So it's really easy to use, and to use in different projects.

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so it's - it is intended to help developers to automate the workflow. And this is a typical

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example of a welcoming action: we can see that actions are treated as code. So we have these

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configuration files, so we expect that we are going to interact with it and also deal with it

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as code. And this code can generate some outputs in our projects, for example, this GitHub Action,

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this welcoming action, creates a comment in our project.

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But then how do developers use this action? This is one thing that we studied. So by looking at

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the configuration files of these actions for 3000 projects - different projects -

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we found 700 different actions being used there. And these actions are spread across 20 categories,

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and these are the most common ones. So continuous integration actions, utilities,

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deployment, publishing, and code quality. And we also found that a typical action is added twice

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and never removed or modified, which means that almost nobody revisit this configuration,

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in this decision. So once you include the action almost nobody revisits. However some specific

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actions are removed, their arguments are changed many times. So since I mentioned that we expect

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to treat it as code, here we see that we are not treating it as code, because once we add a

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new action to our project we are adding a new dependency. So every time we need to maintain

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this action we need to revisit and we need to keep it up to date, so it's a new dependency we add.

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And I also look at how developers are discussing what they are saying about these actions.

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So basically, developers discuss about the maintenance of these actions

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and also the implementation. So for them it's really important how the - how it is maintained

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because it's a new dependency, right, and also how to implement - how to create a new

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one based on their needs, so it also includes discussions about switching from one automation

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to another, for example CI/CD tools, to actions, and also some suggestions on how to implement

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this action and also requesting new actions.
So again here we see that once we add a new action

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we are not just adding a new piece of code that I'm going to automate our workflow:

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we are adding a new dependency. So we believe we are adding code, and we are dealing with code,

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but we are discussing - we are treating it differently and we are discussing about

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it - how its dependencies and tooling.
And also, it's important for us to

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know what is the impact of adding this new dependence to our project. So I was looking at

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different repositories, what they did before the introduction of these actions, and how was it

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after introducing this action. I can go in more details later if you want to know more about it,

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but basically we look at this - a lot of different metrics before and after,

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and we see that there are two interesting things here. First, there is an increase in the number

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of rejected contributions. So you have, after adding these actions, you can see

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more rejected pull requests on your project. Is it something that you are expecting? Do you want to

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reject more? And why you are rejecting more? So it's important to keep it in mind. And also

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there's a decrease in the number of commits that the merged requests are required to have. So

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these two things, at least these two impacts, you are going to see in your project. So basically,

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it is important to keep in mind that we have first one perception and the reality. The perception

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that we have is that we are adding a new tooling, but actually adopting GitHub Actions is taking a

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dependency, and then we need to treat it as a new dependency to our to our project. And also, using

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GitHub Actions might also impact how the community work. So the amount of work that developers need

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to do for each new pull request, for each new contribution that they want to do in your project,

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and how they interact. So these two things might be different from what you are expecting

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when you add a new dependency, so you need to take care. And what I suggest is that

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you have to measure the difference. So if you want to understand what is going on and what

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you are going to see in your project, and if you want to understand, if you are not having

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any unexpected results from these actions, you have to measure what is going on with your

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projects - with your projects. So for example if you are considering using GitHub Actions and you

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care about performance - the performance of your code - you need to measure changes in the code.

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How was it before and how is it after adding these new actions. And if you care about community,

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how the developers communicate to each other, and how much work they need to do, and how

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the development workflow changes and how it impacts the developers, then you have to measure

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the developers' communication and the amount of work and how they are doing it before and after

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the introduction of these actions. So this is what I want you to show today and

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if you have any questions I'm happy to answer them. Thank you.