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 GHA, examining how developers react to workflow failures, how these workflows are utilized by projects, and how these aspects relate to project characteristics. We quantitatively analyze 258,300 workflow run records from 952 repositories and perform an in-depth qualitative analysis of 21 selected, diverse GitHub repositories to understand how maintainers and contributors interact with workflow results. We identify three distinct failure response patterns, observe that higher usage intensity of GHA workflows correlates with lower failure rates, and uncover a configuration-usage gap where the presence of configuration files masks disabled or unused workflows. Moreover, our qualitative analysis of relationships between project characteristics and utilization patterns yields five hypotheses for future validation.

翻译：持续集成与持续部署（CI/CD）已成为现代软件开发的基础，GitHub Actions（GHA）作为主导自动化平台崭露头角。在本研究中，我们分析真实世界的GHA执行记录，考察开发者如何应对工作流失败、这些工作流如何被项目使用，以及这些方面如何与项目特征相关联。我们量化分析来自952个代码仓库的258,300条工作流运行记录，并对21个精选的多样化GitHub代码仓库进行深入定性分析，以理解维护者和贡献者如何与工作流结果互动。我们识别出三种不同的失败响应模式，观察到更高强度的GHA工作流使用与更低的失败率相关，并发现一种配置-使用差距：配置文件的存在掩盖了被禁用或未使用的工作流。此外，我们对项目特征与使用模式之间关系的定性分析提出了五个待未来验证的假设。