How do you handle build failures?

[Carmine Vassallo]

Greetings,

I'm Carmine, a researcher at the University of Zurich interested in supporting developers working with CI/CD.

Among the benefits provided by Continuous Integration (CI), increased team productivity and release frequency are perceived as the main advantages. However, changes that contain defects or that suffer from a poor-quality can lead to build failures that stop a team from delivering. The recent Report on the State of DevOps [1] states: "When failures occur, it can be difficult to understand what caused the problem" and previous work found that developers spend on average one hour to fix build breaks!

In our group at the University of Zurich (Switzerland), we are developing new strategies to provide developers with the right assistance to solve build failures faster and more efficiently. To achieve this, we first need to understand the state of practice from real developers and we would like to learn about your personal experience with build failures in this survey.

I would really appreciate if you could find the time to fill out the following survey to help me in my research:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdw-RuDHv7Vlu2A7I4iGm1yC99xE65lk8UmIqxMJNMIxSpGzQ/viewform?usp=sf_link

Filling out the survey will take you 5min (7min at maximum). Please note that participating in the questionnaire is completely anonymous, but we will publish the anonymized answers as part of a scientific publication.

If you have any questions about the questionnaire or our research, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Best regards,

Carmine Vassallo

Doctoral Student at the University of Zurich, Switzerland

[1] Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, Gene Kim, Accelerate: State of DevOps 2018: Strategies for a New Economy, 2018 https://cloudplatformonline.com/2018-state-of-devops.html