Experienced Benefits of Continuous Integration in Industry Software Product Development: A Case Study

Improving the delivery cycle: A multiple-case study of the toolchains in Finnish software intensive enterprises

“…Thus, the recommendation is that all manual work is minimized, leading to the logical conclusion that proper toolchains are essential to continuous delivery. Ståhl and Bosch studied what effects does continuous integration have [18] 130 and how their differences can be explained with differences between continuous integration implementations. Later, they developed a meta-model to describe differences in continuous integration implementations [19].…”

The highways and country roads to continuous deployment

“…Empirical studies haven't focused on the benefits of and motivations for continuous deployment, and even the benefits of the more established practice of continuous integration seem unclear. 7 We asked the interviewees to describe what benefits they thought continuous deployment has. We uncovered the following six categories of benefits.…”

Automated software integration flows in industry: a multiple-case study

“…In previous work we have confirmed that industry professionals' experiences of continuous integration vary greatly [14], and that there is a large number of variation points where continuous integration, as described in literature, varies [15]. This prompted us to develop a descriptive model to capture these differences, allowing us to more accurately study, document and compare different variants.…”

“…In total, each interviewee was asked fourteen questions: To what extent have you experienced that your project's software integration flow affects... These questions were derived from those used by us in previous work [14], which in turn were based on continuous integration benefits reported in literature. They can be grouped into four topics: supporting agile practices (questions E2-E3), supporting communication (questions E5-E6), improving productivity (questions E8-E11) and improving predictability (questions E13-E14).…”

“…In previous work, we have investigated the effects of continuous integration, as experienced by software development project members [14], as well as the rich variation of continuous integration interpretations and implementations in Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee.…”