Fixing Continuous Integration Tests From Within the IDE With Contextual Information

Research output: Chapter in Book/Conference proceedings/Edited volumeConference contributionScientificpeer-review

45 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

The most common reason for Continuous Integration (CI) builds to break is failing tests. When a build breaks, a developer often has to scroll through hundreds to thousands of log lines to find which test is failing and why. Finding the issue is a tedious process that relies on a developer's experience and increases the cost of software testing. We investigate how presenting different kinds of contextual information about CI builds in the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) impacts the time developers take to fix a broken build. Our IntelliJ plugin TESTAXIS surfaces additional information such as a unique view of the code under test that was changed leading up to the build failure. We conduct a user experiment and show that TESTAXIS helps developers fix failing tests 13.4% to 48.6% faster. The participants found the features of TESTAXIS useful and would incorporate it in their development workflow to save time. With TESTAXIS we set an important step towards removing the need to manually inspect build logs and bringing CI build results to the IDE, ultimately saving developers time.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 30th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Program Comprehension, ICPC 2022
Subtitle of host publicationProceedings
PublisherIEEE
Pages287-297
Number of pages11
ISBN (Electronic)978-1-4503-9298-3
ISBN (Print)978-1-6654-5209-0
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2022
EventICPC 2022: 30th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Program Comprehension - Virtual at Pittsburgh, United States
Duration: 16 May 202217 May 2022

Publication series

NameIEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension
Volume2022-March

Conference

ConferenceICPC 2022
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityVirtual at Pittsburgh
Period16/05/2217/05/22

Bibliographical note

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care
Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

Keywords

  • Software Testing
  • Continuous Integration
  • Developer Assistance
  • IDE Plugin
  • User Experiment

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Fixing Continuous Integration Tests From Within the IDE With Contextual Information'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this