Environmentally-aware use of GitHub Actions

The use of GitHub Actions - and similar platforms - for continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) facilitates the adoption of quality assurance and testing tools in an automated manner, in turn resulting in better quality software and more productive collaboration. However, in the end, all these tools need to run in servers located somewhere, consuming energy in the process. While the convenience and power of these tools is undisputable, the configurations used are often redundant, running an unnecessary range of scenarios that add very little value, if any, to the knowledge on the quality and correctness of the software being analysed. In this talk we discuss some of the steps that can be taken to make a more rational use of GitHub Actions for CI/CD, as well as tools and techniques that can be used to monitor and reduce the energy usage.