The Impact of Adopting Continuous Integration on the Delivery Time of Pull Requests: A Partial Replication and Extension
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Typ
Examensarbete för masterexamen
Program
Publicerad
2019
Författare
GUO, YUNFANG
Modellbyggare
Tidskriftstitel
ISSN
Volymtitel
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Sammanfattning
The practice of Continuous Integration (CI) is indispensable in the software development
process nowadays. In a distributed and collaborative context, CI is a paradigm
for integrating all changes from different developers quickly and safely. Thus the
adoption of CI is considered to fasten delivering new functionalities. A study by
Bernardo et al. doubted this claim, conducted an empirical study and found that
only half of the investigated projects deliver Pull Requests (PR) faster after CI. In
this study, considering the threats to the validity in their study, as well as the generalizability
of their findings, a partial replication study, a comparison to projects
that never apply CI, and an extension study based on other projects with CI are
carried out. Through analysis on 132,006 merged PRs of 82 GitHub projects, I find
that the results of Bernardo et al.’s work still stand, that CI could not always fasten
delivery activities after CI. In addition, by comparing the statistical performance
of projects that apply CI with those that never apply CI, it is proved that similar
changes in development activities can only be observed in projects with CI adopted.
Beskrivning
Ämne/nyckelord
continuous integration , pull-based development , replication study , delivery delay , Travis-CI