Paper Info
Title
Quality and productivity outcomes relating to continuous integration in GitHub
Abstract
Software processes comprise many steps; coding is followed by building, integration testing, system testing, deployment, operations, among others. Software process integration and automation have been areas of key concern in software engineering, ever since the pioneering work of Osterweil; market pressures for Agility, and open, decentralized, software development have provided additional pressures for progress in this area. But do these innovations actually help projects? Given the numerous confounding factors that can influence project performance, it can be a challenge to discern the effects of process integration and automation. Software project ecosystems such as GitHub provide a new opportunity in this regard: one can readily find large numbers of projects in various stages of process integration and automation, and gather data on various influencing factors as well as productivity and quality outcomes. In this paper we use large, historical data on process metrics and outcomes in GitHub projects to discern the effects of one specific innovation in process automation: continuous integration. Our main finding is that continuous integration improves the productivity of project teams, who can integrate more outside contributions, without an observable diminishment in code quality.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1145/2786805.2786850
ESEC/SIGSOFT FSE
Keywords
Field
DocType
Continuous integration, GitHub, pull requests
Software deployment,Integration testing,Software engineering,Computer science,Work in process,Process integration,Theoretical computer science,Software development process,Software quality,Software development,System integration,Process management
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
100
3.13
36
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Yue Yu119519.93
Yue Yu221929.56
Wang Huaimin31025121.31
Premkumar Devanbu44956357.68
Vladimir Filkov5150375.32