The Silent Helper: The Impact of Continuous Integration on Code Reviews

Abstract

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How Do Software Developers Use GitHub Actions to Automate Their Workflows?

“…1) Aggregating project variables: We analyzed data from 6 months before and 6 months after the Action adoption. Similarly to previous work [5,6,14], we exclude 30 days around the Action adoption date to avoid the influence of the instability caused during this period. Afterward, we aggregated individual pull request data into monthly periods, considering 6 months before and after the Action introduction.…”

“…Based on previous work [5,6,14], we also collected six known covariates for each project: Project name: the name of the project to which the pull request belongs. This name is used to uniquely identify the project on GitHub.…”

“…As the table shows, masa-iwasaki/setup-rbenv was removed in all cases where it had previously been added. Looking at the Action's README file, 6 this is unsurprising since it contains the note 'Do Not Use This Action'. Other Actions were removed less frequently, with a median of zero removals (average: 5).…”

“…To reduce this intensive workload, developers often rely on automation tools to perform repetitive tasks to check whether the code builds, the tests pass, and the contribution conforms to a defined style guide [4]. GitHub projects adopt, for example, tools to support Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery or Deployment (CI/CD) [5,6] and for code review [4]. In recent years, software bots have been widely adopted to automate a variety of predefined tasks around pull requests [7].…”

LogChunks

“…Research on Build Logs. The data from LogChunks can support research around the topic of build logs such as how developers use keywords to retrieve information about build failures from logs or how they discuss failures of CI builds within pull requests [5].…”