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 language | English |
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Title of host publication | Proceedings - 30th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Program Comprehension, ICPC 2022 |
Subtitle of host publication | Proceedings |
Publisher | IEEE |
Pages | 287-297 |
Number of pages | 11 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 978-1-4503-9298-3 |
ISBN (Print) | 978-1-6654-5209-0 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2022 |
Event | ICPC 2022: 30th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Program Comprehension - Virtual at Pittsburgh, United States Duration: 16 May 2022 → 17 May 2022 |
Publication series
Name | IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension |
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Volume | 2022-March |
Conference
Conference | ICPC 2022 |
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Country/Territory | United States |
City | Virtual at Pittsburgh |
Period | 16/05/22 → 17/05/22 |
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-careOtherwise 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