Continuous Delivery Practices in a Large Financial Organization
Carmine Vassalo (Universitat Zurich)
Fiorelli Zampetti (University of Sannio)
Daniele Romano (ING Bank)
Moritz Beller (TU Delft - Software Engineering)
A. Panichella (TU Delft - Software Engineering)
Massimiliano Di Penta (University of Sannio)
A.E. Zaidman (TU Delft - Software Engineering)
More Info
expand_more
Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.
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.