A Deep Dive into Continuous Integration Monitoring Practices

One of the main activities in software development is monitoring, which plays a vital role in verifying the proper implementation of processes, identifying errors, and discovering opportunities for improvement. Continuous Integration (CI) covers a set of widely adopted practices that enhance software development. However, there are indications that developers may not adequately monitor all CI practices. In this thesis, we delve deep into the ocean of monitoring CI practices. Our goal is to discover how this monitoring is conducted, demonstrate the advantages of monitoring CI practices, and highlight the challenges that need to be overcome. We conducted a series of studies to analyze the impact of specific CI practices on the volume of Pull Requests and bug-related Issues, as well as the importance attributed to these practices by developers and the support for monitoring provided by the most popular CI tools. Finally, we evaluate monitoring in real-world scenarios, conducting a case study on three projects from three different organizations, where we investigate more deeply the developers' interest in monitoring CI practices, their benefits, challenges, and the evolution of CI practices over a two-month period.

In our first study, we analyze the impact of specific CI practices on the volume of Pull Requests and bug-related Issues. Our findings revealed a positive correlation between CI practices and the increase in the number of merged pull requests. We also identified a significant correlation between the number of bug-related issues and the number of bugs. Additionally, our findings suggest that higher values of CI practices can indicate better quality in the development process.

In our second study, we investigate the importance attributed to these practices by developers and the support for monitoring provided by the most popular CI services. We find that developers usually monitor only code coverage and basic build metadata (e.g. build duration and build status). Developers expressed interest in monitoring CI practices if provided the opportunity. Furthermore, we have identified that several leading CI services still have initial support in monitoring CI practices.

Finally, we evaluate monitoring in real-world scenarios, conducting a case study on three projects from three different organizations, where we investigate more deeply the developers' interest in monitoring CI practices, their benefits, challenges, and the evolution of CI practices over a two-month period. The case study revealed that monitoring CI practices provides several benefits to the project and is cost-effective. Participants demonstrated a strong desire to integrate CI monitoring dashboards with popular CI services.

1. A Deep Dive into Continuous
Integration Monitoring Practices
UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DO RIO GRANDE DO NORTE
CENTRO DE CIÊNCIAS EXATAS E DA TERRA
DEPARTAMENTO DE INFORMÁTICA E MATEMÁTICA APLICADA
PROGRAMA DE PÓS-GRADUAÇÃO EM SISTEMAS E COMPUTAÇÃO
Jadson José dos Santos
PhD Candidate
Doctoral Defense
Advisor: Prof. Dr. Uirá Kulesza
Co-Advisor: Prof. Dr. Daniel Alencar da Costa
Natal-RN
4:30PM Thursday, Apr. 25, 2024
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INTRODUCTION
“Continuous Integration (CI) is a
software development practice
where members of a team integrate
their work frequently, usually each
person integrates at least daily.”
Martin Fowler

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•There is extensive research into the benefits and
costs of Continuous Integration
INTRODUCTION
Hilton et. al. 2016.
Usage, costs, andbenefitsofcontinuousintegrationin open-sourceprojects.
Costs
•CI systems have too high
maintenance costs
•CI takes too long to set up
•Our project doesn’t have automated
tests
•The developers on my project are
not familiar enough with CI
•…
Benefits
•CI makes us less worried about
breaking our builds
•CI helps us catch bugs earlier
•CI helps us deploy more often
•CI makes integration easier
•CI lets us spend less time
debugging
•…

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LITERATURE REVIEW
Zhao et al. 2017
After the transition to
using Travis CI: (i) the
increasing number of
merge commits, (ii)
testsuitesizesseem
toincrease,etc...
Vasilescuet al. 2015
After CI: (i) Teams are significantly
more effective at merging pull
requests. (ii) Core developers are able
to discover significantly more bugs
than in teams not using CI
Bernardo et al. 2018
After CI: a large increase in the
number of submitted, merged and
delivered PRs per release.

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•However
•Most of studies focused in miner repositories and
have examined the overall impact of CI
•However … there is a lack of studies specifically
addressing the monitoring CI practices
LITERATURE REVIEW

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LITERATURE REVIEW
42.5%
Of the primary studies did not provide explicit criteria
for identifying CI usage in projects.
56.25%Among studies that applied only one criterion, CI
service configuration was the most common
Soares et al. 2021

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LITERATURE REVIEW
Felidréet al 2019
(i)TheaveragecodecoverageofJavaprojectsit
was63%;
(ii)60% of the projects have infrequent commits;
(iii)85% of the projects have at least one broken
build that take a long time to be fixed
(iv)most of projects have a build that executes with
more than 10 minutes.
A fact known as CI THEATER.

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AGENDA
OBJECTIVES
METHODOLOGY
STUDY 1
STUDY 2
STUDY 3
CONCLUSION

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OBJECTIVES
This thesis aims to answer the following general research question:

•How important is monitoring CI practices?
•We hypothesize that development teams typically do not adequately monitor
project CI practices
•Consistently monitoring these practices over time can lead to more efficient
and optimized CI processes

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METHODOLOGY

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Study 1: Investigating the Impact of Continuous
Integration Practices on the Volume of Merged
Pull Requests and Closed Bug-Related Issues
of Open-Source Projects
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OBJECTIVES
•Verify the potential influence of 5 CI practice* in the Volume of
merged Pull Requests (related to project productivity) and in the
Volume of bug-related Issue (related to project quality)
Study 1
2 years
First commit
travis.yml Last Build
* 1) build duration, 2) build activity, 3) build health, 4) time to fix a broken build, and 5) commit activity

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METHODOLOGY** S
imilarly to Zhao et al.’s work
Study 1
Most starred GitHub projectsRelevant projects**
27,8833,1432,029776
90
Have used Travis-CI 2 years using Travis-CI
Filter active projects ****Collect Info ***
*** PRs, Issues, commits, and builds** more than 100 stars, 100 PRs, 100 Issues,10MB**** at least 1 build in all 24 month of study
Build LR Models and D.A.

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METHODOLOGY
•RQ1: Which CI practices contribute to higher volume of merged
pull requests?
•We fit linear regression models (Ordinary Least Squares, OLS) to find
associations between the number of merged PRs and the 5 CI practices.
Study 1

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RESULTS
•RQ1: Which CI practices contribute to higher volume of merged
pull requests?
Regression model
R2 0.353
Study 1

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METHODOLOGY
•RQ2: Which CI practice contribute to higher volume of closed bug-
related issues?
•The number of bug-related IR present an excess number of zeros. We applied
zero-inflated negative binomial regression models (ZINB)
Study 1
24 months
00002000010001000
Number of closed
bug-related issues

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RESULTS
•RQ2: Which CI practice contribute to higher volume of closed bug-related issues?
*
Study 1

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METHODOLOGY
•RQ3: Can consistently applied CI practices be an indicator of process quality?
Study 1
Projects where
practices are
above the
overall median
Projects where
practices are
below the
overall median
* a confidence level of 95% and a confidence interval of 10%
Randomly selected
91 and 88 PR*
PR Comments

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RESULTS
•RQ3: Can consistently applied CI practices be an indicator of process quality?
ProjectswithworstCI practicesProjectswithbestCI practices
Study 1

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OBJECTIVES
To better understand the importance and prevalence of
monitoring 7 CI practices, we:
•Document Analysis 1: Investigate whether developers express
the need for monitoring CI practices in their project repositories
•Survey: Where we ask questions regarding the monitoring of CI
practices
•Document Analysis 2: Perform a document analysis of the
official documentation of current state-of-the art CI tools related
to monitoring capabilities
Study 2

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METHODOLOGY*
Study 2
Most starred GitHub projects *Using GitHub Actions
11,0147,658 2,488
121
2 years using CI **
Filter active projects ****Relevant projects***
** with 6 months recent builds
* with more than 100 stars, 100 PRs, 100 Issues,10MB
*** more then 100 builds, issues, PRs, commits and coverage inputs inside study period
Identify Survey Participants
776
**** build information for all 24 months
Identify CI workflows
500
(28 answers)

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METHODOLOGY
RQ1: Do developers express the need to monitor CI practices in
PRs?
Study 2
PR Comments
(4,892 comments)
Randomly selected
382 PRs*73,004 PRs
from 121 projects
* a confidence level of 95% and a confidence interval of 5%

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RESULTS
•RQ1:Do developers express the need to monitor CI practices in
PRs?
Study 2

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•RQ2: What is the perceived importance of monitoring CI practices?
•Most projects (12/19): automatic execution of the CI build and the automatic execution
of tests define the project CI level
•Test related practices (31/85) are the most monitored CI practices
Study 2

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RESULTS
•RQ2: What is the perceived importance of monitoring CI practices?
•Evaluation of CI practices
•Most most developers (20/28),
71%, have given positive
comment about the 7 CI
practices
•Almost half of developers
(11/24) would like to improve
CI practices values
Study 2

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RESULTS
•RQ2: What is the perceived importance of monitoring CI practices?
Developer10
Yes, thesemetricswillprovidevaluableinformationin the
status ofourProject over time.
Developer15
dependsonpractice, for example“commitfrequency” isnot
importantatall, butfixinga brokenbuild is”
Developer18
Absolutely! It savestime in thelongrunandincreases
confidencewhenrefactoringisapplied”
Study 2

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RESULTS
•RQ2: What is the perceived importance of monitoring CI practices?
•Evaluation of CI
practices
•68% of the
developers (19/28)
would like to
receive regular
updates of our
survey because
they think the
monitor the 7 CI
practices is useful
Study 2

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METHODOLOGY
RQ3: Which monitoring features are currently supported by existing
CI tools?
•We conduct a Grey Literature Review (GLR) to compile the existing monitoring
capabilities of existing CI services and third-party tools
•We conduct a search on the official documentation of most popular CI services*
•We examined the sections within the documentation that could be directly
correlated with the concept of monitoring
•We collect all references to third-party tools cited in the official CI services
documentation
•We conduct a search on the official documentation of third-party tools
* TRAVISCI, GHACTIONS, CIRCLECI, APPVEYOR, AZURE, GITLAB and JENKINS.
(Golzadeh, M., Decan, A., Mens, T.: On the rise and fall of ci services in github.
In: 2022 IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER))
Document Analysis
+
Thematic Analysis
Study 2

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RESULTS
•RQ3: Which monitoring features are currently supported by
existing CI tools?
•CI services currently offer limited built-in support for monitoring CI
•Build metadata tracking is the most commonly supported monitoring practice (“Build
Duration” and “Build Status”)
•There are various complementary tools that can enhance this monitoring with a
predominant focus on fundamental information about the performance of the
CI pipeline
•However, they often come with additional costs and complexity
Study 2

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RESULTS
Study 2

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Study 3: Do you monitor CI
practices? I don’t know. You tell me:
A case study
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OBJECTIVES
•We conducted a multiple case study with mixed methods.
•Collection of metrics in three public Brazilian organizations (5 participants).
•5 Research Questions
•Over a period of 8 weeks, we conducted a series of interviews with team
members to gain insights into the benefits and challenges of monitoring CI
practices
RQ1, RQ2,
RQ3, RQ4,
RQ5
RQ1RQ5RQ4
Study 3

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MONITORING TOOL
•We developed an extensive* suite of metrics tool that automatically
collect the evolution of 7 CI practices over time
* Supports: 17 metrics (7 CI + 4 DORA + 6 Basics) and integration 4 tools with GHActions, GITLAB, Sonarqube and CodeCov
Study 3

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RESULTS
•Thematic Analysis
Study 3

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RESULTS
•RQ1: Were the developers satisfied with the project’s CI maturity
levels?
•Most of the projects (!
") were satisfied with the CI maturity level prior to the case
study.
•They did not utilize any metric-driven assessment to evaluate CI maturity
Participant P1
The tool, like the study, also emphasizes
the importance of providing an accurate
idea of how the CI is performing,
enabling individuals to understand the
metrics and reference values.
Participant P2
It’s something we’re still maturing,
we started from scratch.... Then, one
thing ended up helping the other,
seeing these metrics and what
needed improvement in our projects
Study 3

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RESULTS
•RQ2: What benefits does CI monitoring bring?
•Give a overview of CI stage of a project
•Highlight problems related to CI
•Awaken a desire for improvements
•Improve the quality of CI adoption
•Increase communication within the team.
•CI monitoring also proved to be not costly to apply
Participant P1
It brings precisely this visibility of those aspects that can be
considered a problem. As I was talking about this coverage, we already
have this information on the Sonarqube. But the other ones are new
aspects that bring a more qualitative view of the CI practices we did
not have in other tools ...
Study 3

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RESULTS
•RQ2: What benefits does CI monitoring bring?
Participant P2
It helped to highlight... The coverage is
evident; it was interesting because it showed
that there was coverage data, and suddenly, it
disappeared. I think it’s helping.
Participant P3
I think it ... pointing out that we are having problems with the code coverage
metric. Regarding the build, we already felt that the build took a long time and that
the VMs were slow, but not that much, more than 8 hours of build time. We have
tests, tests that involve the instantiation of other modules in VMs, ...., but almost
10h is a very high value.
Participant P5
It brings more confidence related
to some CI needs, for sure. It provided a
better view of this process.
Study 3

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RESULTS
•RQ3: What are the challenges/disadvantages for using it on a daily
basis?
•The time dedicated to other development tasks as the main difficulty in
monitoring CI practice
•The lack of integration with other CI tools
•Legacy projects and the internal culture
•A complex development environment, reflected in the instability of the CI
environment
Participant P1
I get a little worried about not having time to
present what has been completed if I’m going to
do all the tests, then we end up having to fit the
tests into the free time we have in the
sprint
Study 3

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RESULTS
•RQ4: Are developers interested in using the tool?
Participant P3
I received the email and
the problem of code
coverage appeared, as I
already knew about code
coverage, I did not pay
much attention to the tool
because I thought that
perhaps it would be more
of a priority to look at the
issue of the pipeline
Study 3

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RESULTS
•RQ5: What was the evolution of CI practices during the use of the tool?
Organization A
Participant P1
… We already knew
about the coverage
problem from the
beginning, but it
became very evident.
With this information,
we began to act to
resolve
this problem
Study 3

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RESULTS
•RQ5: What was the evolution of CI practices during the use of the tool?
Organization B
Participant P2
… Last week we had
some problems with
infrastructure, we
ended up having to
do some configurations
and such. Because of it,
the build health metric
started to have a
lower value
Study 3

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RESULTS
•RQ5: What was the evolution of CI practices during the use of the tool?
Organization C
Participant P5
… There was also a
period at the end of last
year of the build being
generated in a broken
way … We had already
observed this in Gitlab,
but the monitoring tool
also contributed, in a
way, complemented this
need to fix it
Study 3

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Thesis Main Contributions
Better Development Process
Quality: Our findings suggest that
higher values of CI practices may
indicate better quality in the
development process
Overlooked of CI monitoring: Most of
developers consider just run automatic builds
and coverage (tests execution) to evaluate
maturity of CI process
Monitoring CI Bring Benefits: We discovered strong evidences
indicating that developers place significant importance on monitoring
Continuous Integration (CI) practices and, this monitoring brings
several benefits for the project

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Thesis Main Contributions
Basic Tools Support: Leading CI services and
complementary tools still offer basic support for monitoring
CI practices. Focus on monitoring fundamental
information related to the performance of the CI pipeline

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Thesis Main Contributions
Monitoring Suite Tool: We developed an extensive suite
of metric tool that automatically calculate the values of seven
CI practices.
https://github.com/jadsonjs/holter-devops

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Future Work
?

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What’s Next?
Extensions for new Practices:
Extending this work to assess additional
CI/CD practices in areas like DevOps
Extensions for new
Contexts: Our evaluations
can be replicated in more
extensive projects, testing the
robustness of our results
Tooling: 1) Improvements to our monitoring suite tool can be made. 2) We
strongly recommend that CI services (such as Gitlab, Github, CircleCi,
Jenkins, among others) strive to support CI practices monitoring natively
Measure CI maturity:
Deeper exploration of the
optimal practices values for
different contexts,
establishing ideal values to
determine the CI maturity
level
Extensions for CI practices benefits:
Exploring other ways of evaluating the
benefits of CI practices in software
development projects

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Thank you
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