TY - GEN
T1 - Trade-offs in continuous integration
T2 - 11th Joint Meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, ESEC/FSE 2017
AU - Hilton, Michael
AU - Nelson, Nicholas
AU - Tunnell, Timothy
AU - Marinov, Darko
AU - Dig, Danny
PY - 2017/8/21
Y1 - 2017/8/21
N2 - Continuous integration (CI) systems automate the compilation, building, and testing of software. Despite CI being a widely used activity in software engineering, we do not know what motivates developers to use CI, and what barriers and unmet needs they face. Without such knowledge, developers make easily avoidable errors, tool builders invest in the wrong direction, and researchers miss opportunities for improving the practice of CI. We present a qualitative study of the barriers and needs developers face when using CI. We conduct semi-structured interviews with developers from different industries and development scales. We triangulate our findings by running two surveys. We find that developers face trade-offs between speed and certainty (Assurance), between better access and information security (Security), and between more configuration options and greater ease of use (Flexibility). We present implications of these trade-offs for developers, tool builders, and researchers.
AB - Continuous integration (CI) systems automate the compilation, building, and testing of software. Despite CI being a widely used activity in software engineering, we do not know what motivates developers to use CI, and what barriers and unmet needs they face. Without such knowledge, developers make easily avoidable errors, tool builders invest in the wrong direction, and researchers miss opportunities for improving the practice of CI. We present a qualitative study of the barriers and needs developers face when using CI. We conduct semi-structured interviews with developers from different industries and development scales. We triangulate our findings by running two surveys. We find that developers face trade-offs between speed and certainty (Assurance), between better access and information security (Security), and between more configuration options and greater ease of use (Flexibility). We present implications of these trade-offs for developers, tool builders, and researchers.
KW - Automated testing
KW - Continuous integration
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85030774508&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85030774508&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3106237.3106270
DO - 10.1145/3106237.3106270
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85030774508
T3 - Proceedings of the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering
SP - 197
EP - 207
BT - ESEC/FSE 2017 - Proceedings of the 2017 11th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering
A2 - Zisman, Andrea
A2 - Bodden, Eric
A2 - Schafer, Wilhelm
A2 - van Deursen, Arie
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
Y2 - 4 September 2017 through 8 September 2017
ER -