GitHub Actions Rerun Effectiveness Audit

Audit GitHub Actions rerun dependency and success-after-rerun effectiveness to highlight workflows wasting CI time.

Use this skill to measure how often workflows require reruns and whether reruns are actually recovering failures.

What this skill does

• Reads GitHub Actions run JSON exports
• Tracks rerun episodes using workflow run id + attempt history
• Measures rerun rate, rerun success rate, and extra rerun attempts
• Estimates wasted rerun minutes from attempt durations
• Emits severity (ok, warn, critical) for CI policy gates

Inputs

Optional:

• RUN_GLOB (default: artifacts/github-actions/*.json)
• TOP_N (default: 20)
• OUTPUT_FORMAT (text or json, default: text)
• GROUP_BY (workflow or workflow-branch, default: workflow)
• FAILURE_CONCLUSIONS (comma-separated, default: failure,cancelled,timed_out,startup_failure,action_required)
• SUCCESS_CONCLUSIONS (comma-separated, default: success)
• MIN_RUNS (minimum workflow runs required, default: 4)
• WARN_RERUN_RATE (0..1, default: 0.2)
• CRITICAL_RERUN_RATE (0..1, default: 0.35)
• WARN_RERUN_SUCCESS_RATE (0..1, default: 0.5)
• CRITICAL_RERUN_SUCCESS_RATE (0..1, default: 0.25)
• WARN_WASTED_MINUTES (default: 20)
• CRITICAL_WASTED_MINUTES (default: 60)
• WORKFLOW_MATCH / WORKFLOW_EXCLUDE (regex, optional)
• BRANCH_MATCH / BRANCH_EXCLUDE (regex, optional)
• EVENT_MATCH / EVENT_EXCLUDE (regex, optional)
• REPO_MATCH / REPO_EXCLUDE (regex, optional)
• ACTOR_MATCH / ACTOR_EXCLUDE (regex, optional)
• FAIL_ON_CRITICAL (0 or 1, default: 0)

Collect run JSON

bash

gh run view <run-id> --attempt <attempt> \
  --json databaseId,runAttempt,workflowName,event,headBranch,headSha,conclusion,createdAt,updatedAt,runStartedAt,url,repository,actor,triggeringActor \
  > artifacts/github-actions/run-<run-id>-attempt-<attempt>.json

Run

Text report:

bash

RUN_GLOB='artifacts/github-actions/*.json' \
bash skills/github-actions-rerun-effectiveness-audit/scripts/rerun-effectiveness-audit.sh

JSON output + fail gate:

bash

RUN_GLOB='artifacts/github-actions/*.json' \
OUTPUT_FORMAT=json \
FAIL_ON_CRITICAL=1 \
bash skills/github-actions-rerun-effectiveness-audit/scripts/rerun-effectiveness-audit.sh

Run against bundled fixtures:

bash

RUN_GLOB='skills/github-actions-rerun-effectiveness-audit/fixtures/*.json' \
bash skills/github-actions-rerun-effectiveness-audit/scripts/rerun-effectiveness-audit.sh

Output contract

• Exit 0 in report mode (default)
• Exit 1 when FAIL_ON_CRITICAL=1 and one or more groups are critical
• Text mode prints summary + ranked workflow groups
• JSON mode prints summary + ranked groups + critical groups