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Contribution Details

Type Journal Article
Scope Contributions to practice
Title Every Build You Break: Developer-Oriented Assistance for Build Failure Resolution
Organization Unit
Authors
  • Carmine Vassallo
  • Sebastian Proksch
  • Timothy Zemp
  • Harald C Gall
Item Subtype Original Work
Refereed Yes
Status Published in final form
Language
  • English
Journal Title Empirical Software Engineering
Publisher Springer
Geographical Reach international
ISSN 1382-3256
Volume 25
Number 3
Page Range 2218 - 2257
Date 2020
Abstract Text Continuous integration is an agile software development practice. Instead of integrating features right before a release, they are constantly being integrated into an automated build process. This shortens the release cycle, improves software quality, and reduces time to market. However, the whole process will come to a halt when a commit breaks the build, which can happen for several reasons, e.g., compilation errors or test failures, and fixing the build suddenly becomes a top priority. Developers not only have to find the cause of the build break and fix it, but they have to be quick in all of it to avoid a delay for others. Unfortunately, these steps require deep knowledge and are often time-consuming. To support developers in fixing a build break, we propose Bart, a tool that summarizes the reasons for Maven build failures and suggests possible solutions found on the internet. We will show in a case study with 17 participants that developers find Bart useful to understand build breaks and that using Bart substantially reduces the time to fix a build break, on average by 37%. We have also conducted a qualitative study to better understand the workflows and information needs when fixing builds. We found that typical workflows differ substantially between various error categories, and that several uncommon build errors are both very hard to investigate and to fix. These findings will be useful to inform future research in this area.
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Digital Object Identifier 10.1007/s10664-019-09765-y
Other Identification Number merlin-id:20340
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