I’m Leaving You, Travis: A Continuous Integration Breakup Story

kaestner@cs.cmu.edu (D. Widder, M. Hilton, C. Kästner, B. Vasilescu)
Wed, 28 Nov 2018 13:18:40 -0500

David Widder, Michael Hilton, Christian Kästner, and Bogdan Vasilescu. I’m Leaving You, Travis: A Continuous Integration Breakup Story. In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR), pages 165--169, New York, NY: ACM Press, May 2018.

Continuous Integration (CI) services, which can automatically build, test, and deploy software projects, are an invaluable asset in distributed teams, increasing productivity and helping to maintain code quality. Prior work has shown that CI pipelines can be sophisticated, and choosing and configuring a CI system involves tradeoffs. As CI technology matures, new CI tool offerings arise to meet the distinct wants and needs of software teams, as they negotiate a path through these tradeoffs, depending on their context. In this paper, we begin to uncover these nuances, and tell the story of open-source projects falling out of love with Travis, the earliest and most popular cloud-based CI system. Using logistic regression, we quantify the effects that open-source community factors and project technical factors have on the rate of Travis abandonment. We find that increased build complexity reduces the chances of abandonment, that larger projects abandon at higher rates, and that a project’s dominant language has significant but varying effects. Finally, we find the surprising result that metrics of configuration attempts and knowledge dispersion in the project do not affect the rate of abandonment.