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 GitHub Actions language constructs impacts workflow reliability and maintainability. To do so, we quantitatively analyse 260K workflows from 49K GitHub repositories to understand how they are used in practice and how their usage has evolved from July 2019 to August 2025. We identify 197 language constructs available in the GitHub Actions language and map them to 14 features reflecting workflow capabilities. We observe that only a small set of constructs and features are used very frequently, and that larger and more complex workflows are associated with higher failure rates and more maintenance effort. We identify specific features that are more likely to be linked with reliability and maintainability risks. These insights can help practitioners and researchers improve their understanding and usage of the GitHub Actions language, which can help in improving and sustaining workflow automation practices.

翻译：开发者在管理 GitHub 托管仓库中的 GitHub Actions 工作流配置时常遇到困难，近期研究表明工作流执行失败频发。本文通过实证研究，探讨 GitHub Actions 语言构件的采纳与演进如何影响工作流可靠性与可维护性。为此，我们定量分析了来自49K个GitHub仓库的260K个工作流，以了解其实际使用模式及从2019年7月至2025年8月的演进趋势。我们识别出GitHub Actions语言中可用的197个语言构件，并将其映射至反映工作流能力的14项特征。研究发现，仅有一小部分构件的特征被高频使用，且规模更大、复杂度更高的工作流与更高的失败率及维护成本相关。我们进一步识别出更可能关联可靠性与可维护性风险的特定特征。这些洞察有助于实践者与研究者深化对GitHub Actions语言的理解与应用，进而改进和维持工作流自动化实践。