Automation and Reuse Practices in GitHub Actions Workflows: A Practitioner's Perspective

2026-01-16

AI Summary

This study addresses the significant burden developers face in authoring and maintaining GitHub Actions workflows, stemming from a lack of systematic understanding of real-world automation and reuse practices. Through a mixed-methods approach combining a survey of 419 practitioners with qualitative and quantitative analysis, this work presents the first developer-centric characterization of common automation tasks, patterns of reuse mechanism adoption, and maintenance pain points in workflow development. The findings reveal that while developers heavily rely on reusable Actions, they seldom adopt reusable workflows; version management challenges lead to rampant copy-pasting; and critical aspects such as security and performance monitoring remain under-automated. These insights provide empirical foundations for improving CI/CD toolchains and reuse mechanisms.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Replanning and Plan Repair
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Action, Change, and Causality
• Humans and AI: Other Foundations of Human Computation & AI

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Architectures and workflows that use LLMs for crowd work
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Practical large-scale studies of user experience
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Robustness and generalizability of Web mining methods

Abstract

GitHub natively supports workflow automation through GitHub Actions. Yet, workflow maintenance is often considered a burden for software developers, who frequently face difficulties in writing, testing, debugging, and maintaining workflows. Little knowledge exists concerning the automation and reuse practices favoured by workflow practitioners. We therefore surveyed 419 practitioners to elucidate good and bad workflow development practices and to identify opportunities for supporting workflow maintenance. Specifically, we investigate the tasks that practitioners tend to automate using GitHub Actions, their preferred workflow creation mechanisms, and the non-functional characteristics they prioritise. We also examine the practices and challenges associated with GitHub's workflow reuse mechanisms. We observe a tendency to focus automation efforts on core CI/CD tasks, with less emphasis on crucial areas like security analysis and performance monitoring. Practitioners strongly rely on reusable Actions, but reusable workflows see less frequent adoption. Furthermore, we observed challenges with Action versioning and maintenance. Copy-pasting remains a common practice to have more control and avoid the complexity of depending on reusable components. These insights suggest the need for improved tooling, enhanced support for a wide range of automation tasks, and better mechanisms for discovering, managing, and trusting reusable workflow components.

Problem

• GitHub Actions
• workflow automation
• workflow reuse
• CI/CD
• software maintenance

Innovation

• GitHub Actions
• workflow automation
• reuse practices
• CI/CD
• developer survey