A comparative assessment of improvements in workflow automation : An analysis based on GitHub Actions in opensource projects

Sammanfattning: The number of people working together in repositories grows every day. With increasing activity and interaction in a repository the amount of work required to maintain high quality and productivity is a problem. Automating workflows is a solution many developers lean towards in order to handle the problem but the effects of workflow automation is not yet determined enough to say that it actually helps. Based on GitHub’s workflow automation tool, GitHub Actions, this study looks at the effects of workflow automation by analysing the amount and speed of work in repositories on GitHub. To further understand the effects this study looks at the impact of the number of people interacting with a repository on the speed in which developers work. This study performs a statistical analysis on the difference between repositories that use workflow automation and those that do not to further increase knowledge of developers so that they can make informed decisions. Analysis on the effects of workflow automation shows that repositories that use it have an increased amount of committed code, more pull requests, uses issues more, faster pull request closure, and faster issue closure rates. In general repositories using workflow automation have more stars and contributors than those without. Analysis of the impact of the number of contributors show that usage of workflow automation increases with contributors. The study concludes that further research is required to determine if workflow automation is the causing factor of this or the implementation of workflow automation is an effect of increased activity in repositories.