How do Developers Talk about GitHub Actions? Evidence from Online Software Development Community
Continuous integration, deployment and delivery (CI/CD) have become cornerstones of DevOps practices. In recent years, GitHub Action (GHA) has rapidly replaced the traditional CI/CD tools on GitHub, providing efficiently automated workflows for developers. With the widespread use and influence of GHA, it is critical to understand the existing problems that GHA developers face in their practices as well as the potential solutions to these problems. Unfortunately, we currently have relatively little knowledge in this area. To fill this gap, we conduct a large-scale empirical study of 6,590 Stack Overflow (SO) posts and 315 GitHub issues. Our study leads to the first comprehensive taxonomy of problems related to GHA, covering 4 categories and 16 sub-categories. Then, we analyze the popularity and difficulty of problem categories and their correlations. Further, we distill 56 solution strategies for different GHA problems. Our findings can contribute to the research and development of emerging GHA practices, guiding the future support of tools and technologies.
Thu 18 AprDisplayed time zone: Lisbon change
11:00 - 12:30 | Evolution 2Research Track / Journal-first Papers / Software Engineering Education and Training at Amália Rodrigues Chair(s): Massimiliano Di Penta University of Sannio, Italy | ||
11:00 15mTalk | On Using GUI Interaction Data to Improve Text Retrieval-based Bug Localization Research Track Junayed Mahmud George Mason University, Nadeeshan De Silva William & Mary, Safwat Ali Khan George Mason University, Seyed Hooman Mostafavi George Mason University, S M Hasan Mansur George Mason University, Oscar Chaparro William & Mary, Andrian (Andi) Marcus The University of Texas at Dallas, Kevin Moran University of Central Florida | ||
11:15 15mTalk | DEMISTIFY: Identifying On-device Machine Learning Models Stealing and Reuse Vulnerabilities in Mobile Apps Research Track Pengcheng Ren Shandong University, Chaoshun Zuo Ohio State University, Xiaofeng Liu Shandong University, Wenrui Diao Shandong University, Qingchuan Zhao City University of Hong Kong, Shanqing Guo Shandong University | ||
11:30 15mTalk | How do Developers Talk about GitHub Actions? Evidence from Online Software Development Community Research Track Yang Zhang National University of Defense Technology, China, Yiwen Wu National University of Defense Technology, Tingting Chen College of Computer, National University of Defense Technology, Tao Wang National University of Defense Technology, Hui Liu Beijing Institute of Technology, Huaimin Wang | ||
11:45 15mPaper | Design principles for generating and presenting automated formative feedback on code quality using software metrics Software Engineering Education and Training Eddy van den Aker Zuyd University of Applied Science, Ebrahim Rahimi Open University, the Netherlands | ||
12:00 7mTalk | Automatic Specialization of Third-Party Java Dependencies Journal-first Papers César Soto-Valero KTH, Deepika Tiwari KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Tim Toady Programming Republic of Perl, Benoit Baudry KTH | ||
12:07 7mTalk | Discovering Reusable Functional Features in Legacy Object-Oriented Systems Journal-first Papers Hafedh Mili Université du Québec à Montréal, Imen Benzarti École de technologie supérieure, Amel Elkharraz Collège de Bois-de-Boulogne, Ghizlane El Boussaidi École de Technologie Supérieure, Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc Concordia University and Polytechnique Montréal, Petko Valchev Université du Québec à Montréal | ||