Automation in Open Source Software: A GitHub Marketplace Analysis

This thesis comprises two papers that examine automation tools in the Open Source Software (OSS) ecosystem on GitHub, focusing on GitHub Actions as well as the GitHub Marketplace, which is a platform for sharing these Actions for collaboration and reuse. Our research aims to understand and explore the state of automation in OSS, as existing studies have mainly focused on statistical analysis of a sample of GitHub repositories, neither considering developers’ perspectives nor leveraging the GitHub Marketplace. The first paper conducted a survey analysis to investigate the motivations, decision criteria, and challenges associated with creating, publishing, and using Actions. The second paper explores the GitHub Market- place and presents a mapping study by analyzing 7,878 Actions and 515 research papers mapped into 32 different categories. We found a substantial industry-academia gap, with researchers focusing on experimentation and practitioners relying more on exploration tools. The limited number of OSS automation tools published in academia contrasted with the convenient access practitioners had to the marketplace offerings. This thesis contributes to the understanding of automation in the OSS ecosystem, highlights the industry-academia gap, offers insights for researchers to build on existing work, and aids practitioners in navigating technology and finding synergies.