A Quantitative Study of Java Software Buildability

TL;DR

This study systematically evaluates the build success rate of over 7,200 open source Java projects, revealing that more than 38% fail to build, mainly due to dependency issues, highlighting buildability challenges in Java software.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale quantitative analysis of Java build success rates and identifies key factors influencing build failures.

Findings

38% of Java projects fail to build automatically

Dependency issues are the primary cause of build failures

Factors affecting build success are systematically analyzed

Abstract

Researchers, students and practitioners often encounter a situation when the build process of a third-party software system fails. In this paper, we aim to confirm this observation present mainly as anecdotal evidence so far. Using a virtual environment simulating a programmer's one, we try to fully automatically build target archives from the source code of over 7,200 open source Java projects. We found that more than 38% of builds ended in failure. Build log analysis reveals the largest portion of errors are dependency-related. We also conduct an association study of factors affecting build success.