Continuous Delivery Practices in a Large Financial Organization

Conference paper (2016)

Authors

Carmine Vassalo University of Zürich
Fiorelli Zampetti University of Sannio
D. Romano ING
M.M. Beller Software Engineering - EEMCS
A. Panichella Software Engineering - EEMCS
Massimiliano Di Penta University of Sannio
A.E. Zaidman Software Engineering - EEMCS
Research Group
Software Engineering (EEMCS) (TU Delft)
Copyright: © 2016 Carmine Vassalo, Fiorelli Zampetti, D. Romano, M.M. Beller, A. Panichella, Massimiliano Di Penta, A.E. Zaidman
DOI
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https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSME.2016.72
Testing Refactoring Continuous Integration DevOps Technical Debt Test-Driven Development Continuous Delivery Agile Development
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Published Date

2016-10

Language

English

Reuse Rights

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Faculty

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Department

Software Technology

Research Group

Software Engineering

Abstract

Continuous Delivery is an agile software develop- ment practice in which developers frequently integrate changes into the main development line and produce releases of their software. An automated Continuous Integration infrastructure builds and tests these changes. Claimed advantages of CD include early discovery of (integration) errors, reduced cycle time, and better adoption of coding standards and guidelines. This paper reports on a study in which we surveyed 152 developers of a large financial organization (ING Netherlands), and investigated how they adopt a Continuous Integration and delivery pipeline during their development activities. In our study, we focus on topics related to managing technical debt, as well as test automation practices. The survey results shed light on the adoption of some agile methods in practice, and sometimes confirm, while in other cases, confute common wisdom and results obtained in other studies. For example, we found that refactoring tends to be performed together with other development activities, technical debt is almost always “self-admitted”, developers timely document source code, and assure the quality of their product through extensive automated testing, with a third of respondents dedicating more than 50% of their time to do testing activities.