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Abstract

GitHub Actions (GA) enjoy increasing popularity in many software development projects as a means to automate repetitive software engineering tasks by enabling programmable event-driven workflows. Researchers typically analyze GA at the raw data level using batch tools to mine and analyze actions, jobs, and steps within GA workflows. Although this approach is widely applicable, it ignores the specific context of the GA workflow domain. Consequently, researchers do not reason directly about the domain abstractions. We present our preliminary steps in building EGAD (Explorable GitHub Action Domain Model), a moldable domain-specific tool to depict and analyze detailed GA workflow data. EGAD consists of an explorable domain model of GA workflows augmented with custom, domain-specific views, and live narratives. We illustrate EGAD in action using it to explore “sticky commits” in GitHub repositories.