Uncovering the Benefits and Challenges of Continuous Integration Practices
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 2006, Fowler and Foemmel defined ten core Continuous Integration (CI) practices that could increase the speed of software development feedback cycles and improve software quality. Since then, these practices have been widely adopted by industry and subsequent research has shown they improve software quality. However, there is poor understanding ofhoworganizations implement these practices, of thebenefitsdevelopers perceive they bring, and of thechallengesdevelopers and organizations experience in implementing them. In this article, we discuss a multiple-case study of three small- to medium-sized companies using the recommended suite of ten CI practices. Using interviews and activity log mining, we learned that these practices are broadly implemented buthowthey are implemented varies depending on their perceived benefits, the context of the project, and the CI tools used by the organization. We also discovered that CI practices can create new constraints on the software process that hurt feedback cycle time. For researchers, we show that how CI is implemented varies, and thus studying CI (for example, using data mining) requires understanding these differences as important context for research studies. For practitioners, our findings reveal in-depth insights on the possible benefits and challenges from using the ten practices, and how project context matters.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.051 | 0.091 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".