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

Continuous Integration (CI) is a software development methodology that seamlessly integrates code changes into a central repository. Despite its numerous advantages, there is limited information on how the characteristics of software projects affect the success rates of CI builds. In this paper, we examine the impact of various software project characteristics on CI build success rates. To do so, we collect build-level and project-level data from 2,283 GitHub projects that use CircleCI as their CI platform and calculate the yearly trends of their CI build success rates. We then model these yearly trends against project characteristics to determine the relationships between them. Our findings reveal that although projects with positive success rate trends often exhibit higher values in typical project characteristics, these factors do not significantly influence success rate trends. In contrast, timely project characteristics have a significant impact on CI build success rates.