Title: An Empirical Characterization of Bad Practices in Continuous Integration Authors: Fiorella Zampetti - University of Sannio, Carmine Vassallo - University of Zurich, Sebastiano Panichella - Zurich University of Applied Science Gerardo Canfora - University of Sannio, Harald Gall - University of Zurich, Massimiliano Di Penta - University of Sannio Link to publication: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10664-019-09785-8

1. An Empirical Characterization of
Bad Practices in
Continuous Integration
Fiorella
Zampetti*
Carmine
Vassallo+
Sebastiano
Panichella§
Gerardo
Canfora*
Harald
Gall+
Massimiliano
Di Penta*
* University of Sannio, + University of Zurich, § Zurich University of Applied Sciences

2. "Continuous Integration is a
software development
practice where members of a
team integrate their work
frequently…"
Martin Fowler

3. Main Benefits
… improves
developers'
communication.
… increases
developers'
productivity.
… increases
customers'
satisfaction.
… builds high quality
applications through
rapid iterations.

4. CI/CD adoption is challenging!

5. CI/CD adoption is challenging!
"A cultural shift is mandatory."
"We do not really have a process on
how to collaborate and exchange
information in between teams."
"The developers on my project are not
familiar enough with CI."
"Miss of fully automated test suites."

6. Duvall’s good and bad
practices
Online catalog with
50 patterns and
antipatterns

7. Do these antipatterns actually occur in practice?
How do developers perceive them?

8. 13 Semi-structured
interviews
Mining StackOverflow
Discussions
(533 posts over 4645)

9. Card Sorting

10. 79 CI bad smells grouped into 7 categories
 Repository
 Infrastructure
 Build Process Configuration
 Build Maintainability
 Quality Assurance
 Delivery
 Culture

11. Aged and un-sync branches
Master
Feature A
Feature B
Performance Improvement

12. Master
Feature A
Feature B
✘ ✘
✘
✔︎
Broken master

13. Quite relevant problem when Duvall
wrote his book in 2007
No big deal today, unless you work on
embedded software working on
complex, expensive hardware
On setting up the right infrastructure

14. On Nightly Builds
Poll
changes
Duvall discourages
just relying on nightly builds
Version
Control
System
CI Server
Developers still use it for
computational-intensive
testing and analysis

15. Build Script Smell
 Abuse of shell script
 Complex scripts
 Coupling to environments, no parametrization

16. Poor build observability
Build errors not clearly
visible in the build
Failures only sent to DevOps
that explicitly subscribed

17. Skipping tests and quality checks
code
test1
✔︎

18. Skipping tests and quality checks
code
test1
✔︎
code
test1
test2
✘

19. Skipping tests and quality checks
code
test1
✔︎
code
test1
test2
✘
test1
test2
✔︎

20. Failing to configure quality checks

21. Practitioners
 Do not use out-of-the-box tools, nor listen customers only
 Favor specific, portable tools over hacking

22. Researchers
 Development of automated CI bad smell detectors
 Support for failure analysis
Practitioners
 Do not use out-of-the-box tools, nor listen customers only
 Favor specific, portable tools over hacking

23. Researchers
 Development of automated CI bad smell detectors
 Support for failure analysis
Educators
 Teach CI culture, not just technology
Practitioners
 Do not use out-of-the-box tools, nor listen customers only
 Favor specific, portable tools over hacking

24. An Empirical Characterization of
Bad Practices in
Continuous Integration
fiorella.zampetti@unisannio.it
fiorellazampetti@gmail.com
@fio_zampetti