From First Use to Final Commit: Studying the Evolution of Multi-CI Service Adoption

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Chopra, Nitika, Ghaleb, Taher A.
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Chopra, Nitika
Ghaleb, Taher A.
author_facet Chopra, Nitika
Ghaleb, Taher A.
contents Continuous Integration (CI) services, such as GitHub Actions and Travis CI, are widely adopted in open-source development to automate testing and deployment. Though existing research often examines individual services in isolation, it remains unclear how projects adopt and transition between multiple services over time. To understand how CI adoption is evolving across services, we present a preliminary study analyzing the historical CI adoption of 18,924 Java projects hosted on GitHub between January 2008 and December 2024, adopting at least one of eight CI services, namely Travis CI, AppVeyor, CircleCI, Azure Pipelines, GitHub Actions, Bitbucket, GitLab CI, and Cirrus CI. Specifically, we investigate: (1) how frequently CI services are co-adopted or replaced, and (2) how maintenance activity varies across different services. Our analysis shows that the use of multiple CI services within the same project is a recurring pattern observed in nearly one in five projects, often reflecting migration across CI services. Our study is among the first to examine multi-CI adoption in practice, offering new insights for future research and highlighting the need for strategies and tools to support service selection, coordination, and migration in evolving CI environments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_20095
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle From First Use to Final Commit: Studying the Evolution of Multi-CI Service Adoption
Chopra, Nitika
Ghaleb, Taher A.
Software Engineering
Continuous Integration (CI) services, such as GitHub Actions and Travis CI, are widely adopted in open-source development to automate testing and deployment. Though existing research often examines individual services in isolation, it remains unclear how projects adopt and transition between multiple services over time. To understand how CI adoption is evolving across services, we present a preliminary study analyzing the historical CI adoption of 18,924 Java projects hosted on GitHub between January 2008 and December 2024, adopting at least one of eight CI services, namely Travis CI, AppVeyor, CircleCI, Azure Pipelines, GitHub Actions, Bitbucket, GitLab CI, and Cirrus CI. Specifically, we investigate: (1) how frequently CI services are co-adopted or replaced, and (2) how maintenance activity varies across different services. Our analysis shows that the use of multiple CI services within the same project is a recurring pattern observed in nearly one in five projects, often reflecting migration across CI services. Our study is among the first to examine multi-CI adoption in practice, offering new insights for future research and highlighting the need for strategies and tools to support service selection, coordination, and migration in evolving CI environments.
title From First Use to Final Commit: Studying the Evolution of Multi-CI Service Adoption
topic Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.20095