On the Need to Monitor Continuous Integration Practices -- An Empirical Study

TL;DR

This empirical study reveals that developers often overlook monitoring CI practices, with existing tools providing limited support, highlighting the need for integrated monitoring features in CI services to improve software development quality.

Contribution

The paper provides empirical evidence on developers' perceptions and the current state of CI practice monitoring, emphasizing the gap in native support within CI tools.

Findings

Test Coverage is the most monitored CI practice (>80%)

Build Health and Time to Fix a Broken Build are under-monitored

Existing CI services offer limited native monitoring, relying on third-party tools

Abstract

Continuous Integration (CI) encompasses a set of widely adopted practices that enhance software development. However, there are indications that developers may not adequately monitor CI practices. Hence, this paper explores developers' perceptions regarding the monitoring CI practices. To achieve this, we first perform a Document Analysis to assess developers' expressed need for practice monitoring in pull requests comments generated by developers during the development process. After that, we conduct a survey among developers from 121 open-source projects to understand perception of the significance of monitoring seven CI practices in their projects. Finally, we triangulate the emergent themes from our survey by performing a second Document Analysis to understand the extent of monitoring features supported by existing CI services. Our key findings indicate that: 1) the most frequently mentioned CI practice during the development process is ``Test Coverage'' (> 80\%), while ``Build Health'' and ``Time to Fix a Broken Build'' present notable opportunities for monitoring CI practices; 2) developers do not adequately monitor all CI practices and express interest in monitoring additional practices; and 3) the most popular CI services currently offer limited native support for monitoring CI practices, requiring the use of third-party tools. Our results lead us to conclude that monitoring CI practices is often overlooked by both CI services and developers. Using third-party tools in conjunction with CI services is challenging, they monitor some redundant practices and still falls short of fully supporting CI practices monitoring. Therefore, CI services should implement CI practices monitoring, which would facilitate and encourage developers to monitor them.