Practitioners' Challenges and Perceptions of CI Build Failure Predictions at Atlassian
This addresses practical challenges for software developers at Atlassian in managing CI build failures, but it is incremental as it focuses on a specific company's environment.
The study investigated CI build failures at Atlassian, finding that repository dimension is the key influencing factor and that developers perceive these failures as challenging, with CI build prediction offering proactive insights and facilitating team decision-making.
Continuous Integration (CI) build failures could significantly impact the software development process and teams, such as delaying the release of new features and reducing developers' productivity. In this work, we report on an empirical study that investigates CI build failures throughout product development at Atlassian. Our quantitative analysis found that the repository dimension is the key factor influencing CI build failures. In addition, our qualitative survey revealed that Atlassian developers perceive CI build failures as challenging issues in practice. Furthermore, we found that the CI build prediction can not only provide proactive insight into CI build failures but also facilitate the team's decision-making. Our study sheds light on the challenges and expectations involved in integrating CI build prediction tools into the Bitbucket environment, providing valuable insights for enhancing CI processes.