Investigating CI/CD-based Technical Debt Management in Open-source Projects

TL;DR

This study analyzes how technical debt management tools are integrated into CI/CD pipelines in open-source projects, revealing common practices and anti-patterns through large-scale mining of GitHub configurations.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale empirical analysis of TDM tool integration in CI/CD pipelines, identifying prevalent practices and anti-patterns.

Findings

Most TDM tools are run via external scripts

Absent Feedback is the most common anti-pattern

Approximately 3,684 pipelines include TDM tools

Abstract

Managing technical debt (TD) is critical to ensure the sustainability of long-term software projects. However, the time and cost involved in technical debt management (TDM) often discourage practitioners from performing this activity consistently. Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines offer an opportunity to support TDM by embedding automated practices directly into the development workflow. Despite this potential, it remains unclear how TDM tools could be integrated into CI/CD pipelines, and we still lack established best practices for this process. To address this problem, the objective of this study is to understand how TDM tools have been used in CI/CD pipelines and also identify potential configuration anti-patterns. To this end, we conducted a large-scale mining software repository (MSR) study on GitHub. In total, we collected around 600,000 Travis CI configuration files and 50,000 supporting scripts, and identified 3,684 pipelines that contain at least one TDM tool. We applied descriptive statistics to analyze the prevalence of tools and anti-patterns, and our findings show that most tools are executed and integrated using an external script; in addition, \textit{Absent Feedback} is the most common configuration anti-pattern. We believe that researchers and practitioners can use the evidence of this study to further investigate how to improve both the tools that are integrated in CI/CD and the integration practices.