  GitHub introduced "Actions" in 2019 to increase workflow velocity and add
customized automation to the repositories. Any individual can develop Actions
for automating workflow on GitHub repositories and others can reuse them
whenever open source. GitHub introduced its marketplace for commercializing and
sharing these automation tools, which currently hosts 16,730 Actions. Yet,
there are numerous Actions that are developed and distributed in local
repositories and outside the Marketplace. So far, the research community
conducted mining studies to understand Actions with a significant focus on
CI/CD. We conducted a survey study with 90 Action developers and users to
understand the motivations and best practices in using, developing, and
debugging Actions, and the challenges associated with these tasks. We found
that developers prefer Actions with verified creators and more stars when
choosing between similar Actions, and often switch to an alternative Action
when facing bugs or a lack of documentation. 60.87% of the developers consider
the composition of YAML files, which are essential for Action integration,
challenging and error-prone. They mainly check Q\&A forums to fix issues with
these YAML files. Finally, developers tend to avoid using Actions (and hence
automation) to reduce complexity, and security risk, or when the benefits of
Actions are not worth the cost/effort of setting up Actions for automation.
