An Empirical Study of the Personnel Overhead of Continuous Integration
| Autor: | Eduardo Coronado-Montoya, Shane McIntosh, Marco Manglaviti, Keheliya Gallaba |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2017 |
| Předmět: |
Computer science
business.industry Software development 020207 software engineering 02 engineering and technology Artifact (software development) Service provider Software quality Electronic mail Empirical research Overhead (business) 020204 information systems 0202 electrical engineering electronic engineering information engineering Operations management Software engineering business Codebase |
| Zdroj: | MSR |
| DOI: | 10.1109/msr.2017.31 |
| Popis: | Continuous Integration (CI) is a software development practice where changes to the codebase are compiled and automatically checked for software quality issues. Like any software artifact (e.g., production code, build specifications), CI systems require an investment of development resources in order to keep them running smoothly. In this paper, we examine the human resources that are associated with developing and maintaining CI systems. Through the analysis of 1,279 GitHub repositories that adopt Travis CI (a popular CI service provider), we observe that: (i) there are 0 to 6 unique contributors to CI-related development in any 30-day period, regardless of project size, and (ii) the total number of CI developers has an upper bound of 15 for 99.2% of the studied projects, regardless of overall team size. These results indicate that service-based CI systems only require a small proportion of the development team to contribute. These costs are almost certainly outweighed by the reported benefits of CI (e.g., team communication and time-to-market for new content). |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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