Title
A large-scale empirical study of compiler errors in continuous integration.
Abstract
Continuous Integration (CI) is a widely-used software development practice to reduce risks. CI builds often break, and a large amount of efforts are put into troubleshooting broken builds. Despite that compiler errors have been recognized as one of the most frequent types of build failures, little is known about the common types, fix efforts and fix patterns of compiler errors that occur in CI builds of open-source projects. To fill such a gap, we present a large-scale empirical study on 6,854,271 CI builds from 3,799 open-source Java projects hosted on GitHub. Using the build data, we measured the frequency of broken builds caused by compiler errors, investigated the ten most common compiler error types, and reported their fix time. We manually analyzed 325 broken builds to summarize fix patterns of the ten most common compiler error types. Our findings help to characterize and understand compiler errors during CI and provide practical implications to developers, tool builders and researchers.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1145/3338906.3338917
ESEC/SIGSOFT FSE
Keywords
Field
DocType
Continuous Integration,Build Failures,Compiler Errors
Troubleshooting,Software engineering,Computer science,Compiler,Theoretical computer science,Continuous integration,Java,Software development,Empirical research
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-4503-5572-8
2
0.35
References 
Authors
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Chen Zhang111241.68
Bihuan Chen227721.54
Linlin Chen330.69
Xin Peng459967.59
Wenyun Zhao552654.45