Master’s Thesis Presentation • Software Engineering • The Impact of Code Ownership of DevOps Artefacts on the Outcome of DevOps CI Builds

Wednesday, December 13, 2023 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm EST (GMT -05:00)

Please note: This master’s thesis presentation will take place online.

Ajiromola Kola-Olawuyi, Master’s candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

Supervisor: Professor Mei Nagappan

This study focuses on factors that may significantly 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: \textbf{(1)} all project developers need to contribute to DevOps artefacts, and \textbf{(2)} a dedicated group of developers needs to be authoring DevOps artefacts. To analyze which strategy works best for OSS projects, we conduct an extensive empirical analysis on a dataset of 892,193 DevOps CircleCI builds spanning 1,689 Open-Source Software projects. We employ a two-pronged approach to our study. First, we investigate the impact of chronological code ownership of DevOps artefacts on the outcome of a DevOps CI build on a build level. Second, we study the impact of the Skewness of DevOps contributions on the success rate of DevOps CI builds on a project level.

Our findings reveal that, in general, larger chronological ownership and higher Skewness values of DevOps contributions lead 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.


To attend this master’s thesis presentation on Zoom, please go to https://uwaterloo.zoom.us/j/92848973506.