Technical Report
 

Usage, Costs, and Benefits of Continuous Integration in Open-Source Projects

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https://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/concern/technical_reports/5d86p4394

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  • Continuous integration (CI) systems automate the compilation, building, and testing of software. Despite CI rising as a big success story in automated software engineering, it has received almost no attention from the research community. For example, how widely is CI used in practice, and what are some costs and benefits associated with CI? Without answering such questions, developers, tool builders, and researchers make decisions based on folklore instead of data. In this paper, we use three complementary methods to study in-depth the usage of CI in open-source projects. To understand what CI systems developers use, we analyzed 34,544 open-source projects from GitHub. To understand how developers use CI, we analyzed 1,529,291 builds from the most popular CI system. To understand why projects use or do not use CI, we surveyed 442 developers. With this data, we answered 14 questions related to the usage, cost, and benefits of CI. Among our results, we show evidence that supports the popular claim that CI helps projects release more often. We also discovered that 70% of the most popular projects from GitHub use CI, as well as finding that the overall percentage of projects using CI continues to grow, making it important and timely to focus more research on CI.
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  • This work was partially funded through the NSF CCF-1439957 grant.
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file details OpenSourceCIUsage.pdf 2017-10-25 Public Download