The Impact of Code Ownership of DevOps Artefacts on the Outcome of DevOps CI Builds

Abstract

This study focuses on factors that may influence the outcomes of CI builds triggered by commits modifying and/or adding DevOps artefacts to the projects, i.e., DevOps-related CI builds. In particular, code ownership of DevOps artefacts is one such factor that could impact DevOps-related CI builds.

There are two main strategies as suggested in prior work: (1) all project developers need to contribute to DevOps artefacts, and (2) a dedicated group of developers needs to be authoring DevOps artefacts.

To analyze which strategy works best for OSS projects, we conduct an empirical analysis on a dataset of 892,193 CircleCI builds spanning 1,689 Open-Source Software projects. First, we investigate the impact of code ownership of DevOps artefacts on the outcome of a CI build on a build level. Second, we study the impact of the Skewness of DevOps contributions on the success rate of CI builds at the project level.

Our findings reveal that, in general, larger code ownership and higher Skewness values of DevOps contributions \shane{are related} to more successful build outcomes and higher rates of successful build outcomes, respectively. However, we also find that projects with low skewness values could have high build success rates if the number of developers in the project is relatively small. Thus, our results suggest that while larger software organizations are better off having dedicated DevOps developers, smaller organizations would benefit from having all developers involved in DevOps.