Software projects frequently use automation tools to perform repetitive activities in the distributed software development process. Recently, GitHub introduced GitHub Actions, a feature providing automated workflows for software projects. Understanding and anticipating the effects of adopting such technology is important for planning and management. Our research investigates how projects use GitHub Actions, what the developers discuss about them, and how project activity indicators change after their adoption. Our results indicate that 1,489 out of 5,000 most popular repositories (almost 30% of our sample) adopt GitHub Actions and that developers frequently ask for help implementing them. Our findings also suggest that the adoption of GitHub Actions leads to more rejections of pull requests (PRs), more communication in accepted PRs and less communication in rejected PRs, fewer commits in accepted PRs and more commits in rejected PRs, and more time to accept a PR. We found similar results when segmenting our results by categories of GitHub Actions. We suggest practitioners consider these effects when adopting GitHub Actions on their projects.

翻译：软件项目在分布式软件开发过程中频繁使用自动化工具来执行重复性活动。近期，GitHub推出了GitHub Actions这一功能，为软件项目提供自动化工作流。理解并预测采用此类技术的影响对项目规划与管理至关重要。本研究探究了项目如何使用GitHub Actions、开发者对其讨论的内容，以及采用该功能后项目活动指标的变化。结果表明，在5000个最受欢迎的代码仓库中，有1489个（约占样本的30%）采用了GitHub Actions，且开发者在实施过程中频繁寻求帮助。研究还发现，采用GitHub Actions会导致：拉取请求（PR）被拒绝率上升；已接受PR中的沟通增加，而被拒绝PR中的沟通减少；已接受PR的提交次数减少，被拒绝PR的提交次数增加；以及PR被接受所需的时间延长。在按GitHub Actions类别进行细分分析时，我们得到了相似的结果。建议实践者在项目中采用GitHub Actions时考虑这些影响。