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Usage, costs, and benefits of continuous integration in open-source projects
Hilton M., Tunnell T., Huang K., Marinov D., Dig D.  ASE 2016 (Proceedings of the 31st IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, Singapore, Sep 3-7, 2016)426-437.2016.Type:Proceedings
Date Reviewed: Apr 12 2017

A profound revolution has been taking place throughout software engineering, led again by the software industry. Continuous integration (CI) was first discussed in 1991, but until recently only a handful of research papers on the subject were published. With CI adoption increasing, it is worth understanding the advantages of it. This study addresses questions on which systems have been used, by whom, and why CI was adopted.

After a brief overview on CI history and key industry products, the authors conducted three main analyses. The first analyzed 34,544 open-source projects and answered research questions related to the usage of CI. The growing adoption of such systems is notable. Then, more than a million build processes from the most popular CI system were analyzed to disclose costs associated with CI adoption. This part reveals that CI is not being used by some software developers because of a lack of knowledge of the practice. The final analysis covered questions related to the benefits of CI. The authors surveyed 442 developers to outline the perceived advantages of CI. They mainly found that projects using CI release more often than those that do not use it.

This study contributes to the CI body of knowledge in regards to evidence-based software engineering. It presents a greater effort to organize and disseminate CI research to practitioners, so that we can rely on verified evidence rather than personal observations. There is limited empirical understanding of CI practices, and further study could be warranted.

Reviewer:  Klerisson Paixao Review #: CR145191 (1706-0382)
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