Tackling Build Failures in Continuous Integration

Abstract

In popular continuous integration(CI) practice, coding is followed by building, integration and system testing, pre-release inspection, and deploying artifacts. This can reduce integration risk and speed up the development process. But large number of CI build failures may interrupt the normal software development process. So, the failures need to be analyzed and fixed quickly. Although various automated program repair techniques have great potential to resolve software failures, the existing techniques mostly focus on repairing source code. So, those techniques cannot directly help resolve software build failures. Apart from that, a special challenge to fix build failures in CI environment is that the failures are often involved with both source code and build scripts. This paper outlines promising preliminary work towards automatic build repair in CI environment that involves both source code and build script. As the first step, we conducted an empirical study on software build failures and build fix patterns. Based on the findings of the empirical study, we developed an approach that can automatically fix build errors involving build scripts. We plan to extend this repair approach considering both source code and build script. Moreover, we plan to quantify our automatic fixes by user study and comparison between fixes generated by our approach and actual fixes.