Trade-Offs in Continuous Integration: Assurance, Security, and Flexibility

Continuous integration (CI) systems automate the compilation, building, and testing of software. Despite CI being a widely used activity in software engineering, we do not know what motivates developers to use CI, and what barriers and unmet needs they face. Without such knowledge, developers make easily avoidable errors, tool builders invest in the wrong direction, and researchers miss opportunities for improving the practice of CI. We present a qualitative study of the barriers and needs developers face when using CI. We conduct semi-structured interviews with developers from different industries and development scales. We triangulate our findings by running two surveys. We find that developers face trade-offs between speed and certainty (Assurance), between better access and information security (Security), and between more configuration options and greater ease of use (Flexibility). We present implications of these trade-offs for developers, tool builders, and researchers.