Oops, My Tests Broke the Build: An Explorative Analysis of Travis CI with GitHub
Year: 2017
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Continuous Integration (CI) has become a best practice of modern software development. Yet, at present, we have a shortfall of insight into the testing practices that are common in CI-based software development. In particular, we seek quantifiable evidence on how central testing is to the CI process, how strongly the project language influences testing, whether different integration environments are valuable and if testing on the CI can serve as a surrogate to local testing in the IDE. In an analysis of 2,640,825 Java and Ruby builds on Travis CI, we find that testing is the single most important reason why builds fail. Moreover, the programming language has a strong influence on both the number of executed tests, their run time, and proneness to fail. The use of multiple integration environments leads to 10% more failures being caught at build time. However, testing on Travis CI does not seem an adequate surrogate for running tests locally in the IDE. To further research on Travis CI with GitHub, we introduce TravisTorrent.
DOI: 10.1109/msr.2017.62
Authors: Moritz Beller, Georgios Gousios, Andy Zaidman
Institution: Delft University of Technology
Language: English
Subfield: Information Systems
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2733244695