Cache-Related Smells in GitLab CI/CD: Comprehensive Catalog, Automated Detection, and Empirical Evidence

TL;DR

This paper identifies and catalogs cache-related issues in GitLab CI/CD, introduces an automated detection tool called CROSSER, and provides empirical evidence of the prevalence of these issues in open-source projects.

Contribution

It presents a comprehensive catalog of cache-related smells, a detection tool with high accuracy, and empirical analysis of their occurrence in real-world projects.

Findings

Widespread presence of cache-related smells in open-source projects

CROSSER achieves an F1 score of 0.98 in detection

Only 11% of projects are free of cache-related smells

Abstract

Continuous Integration and Deployment (CI/CD) facilitate rapid software delivery, making fast feedback and minimal downtime essential. While caching has been shown to be an effective technique for tackling pipeline performance and reliability issues, existing works have primarily focused on missing dependency caches, ignoring other types of caches and cache misconfigurations. In this paper, we present a comprehensive catalog of ten cache-related smells in GitLab CI/CD that negatively impact performance and reliability, validated on a corpus of grey literature. To address the smells, we propose CROSSER, a tool that automatically detects seven of the ten smells. We evaluate CROSSER on a manually labeled dataset of 82 mature projects, achieving an overall F1 score of 0.98. Finally, we investigate the presence of smells across a large dataset of 228 mature open-source projects and outline our empirical findings. Our results show a widespread frequency of the smells, as only 11% of the projects do not present any. We also show that developers may not be aware of higher-level caching functionalities.