Software Project Characteristics that Impact the Success Rate of Continuous Integration Builds

Continuous Integration (CI) is a software development methodology that seamlessly integrates change sets into a central repository. Despite its numerous advantages, there is limited information on how software project characteristics affect CI. This paper examines the impact of various software project characteristics on CI build success rates. To do so, we collect build- and project-level data from 2,283 GitHub projects that use CircleCI (a CI platform) and calculate the yearly trends of their CI build success rates. We then model these trends against project characteristics to determine their relationships. Our findings reveal that although projects with positive success rate trends often exhibit higher values for typical project characteristics, we do not observe any statistically significant impact of these characteristics on the success rate trends. However, timely project characteristics, such as the time between a project's first and last builds, significantly impact CI success rate trends.