  Automated tools are frequently used in social coding repositories to perform
repetitive activities that are part of the distributed software development
process. Recently, GitHub introduced GitHub Actions, a feature providing
automated workflows for repository maintainers. Although several Actions have
been built and used by practitioners, relatively little has been done to
evaluate them. Understanding and anticipating the effects of adopting such kind
of technology is important for planning and management. Our research is the
first to investigate how developers use Actions and how several activity
indicators change after their adoption. Our results indicate that, although
only a small subset of repositories adopted GitHub Actions to date, there is a
positive perception of the technology. Our findings also indicate that the
adoption of GitHub Actions increases the number of monthly rejected pull
requests and decreases the monthly number of commits on merged pull requests.
These results are especially relevant for practitioners to understand and
prevent undesirable effects on their projects.
