Language-specific make technology for the Java programming language
OOPSLA '02 Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications
Overhauling Amd for the '00s: A Case Study of GNU Autotools
Proceedings of the FREENIX Track: 2002 USENIX Annual Technical Conference
The Build-Time Software Architecture View
ICSM '01 Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM'01)
Detection of Logical Coupling Based on Product Release History
ICSM '98 Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Maintenance
Use of relative code churn measures to predict system defect density
Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Software engineering
Feature Identification: A Novel Approach and a Case Study
ICSM '05 Proceedings of the 21st IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance
Beyond source code: the importance of other artifacts in software development (a case study)
Journal of Systems and Software - Special issue: Selected papers from the 4th source code analysis and manipulation (SCAM 2004) workshop
An empirical study of build maintenance effort
Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering
Hi-index | 0.00 |
The build system, i.e., the infrastructure that converts source code into deliverables, plays a critical role in the development of a software project. For example, developers rely upon the build system to test and run their source code changes. Without a working build system, development progress grinds to a halt, as the source code is rendered useless. Based on experiences reported by developers, we conjecture that build maintenance for large software systems is considerable, yet this maintenance is not well understood. A firm understanding of build maintenance is essential for project managers to allocate personnel and resources to build maintenance tasks effectively, and reduce the build maintenance overhead on regular development tasks, such as fixing defects and adding new features. In our work, we empirically study build maintenance in one proprietary and nine open source projects of different sizes and domain. Our case studies thus far show that: (1) similar to Lehman's first law of software evolution, build system specifications tend to grow unless effort is invested into restructuring them, (2) the build system accounts for up to 31% of the code files in a project, and (3) up to 27% of development tasks that change the source code also require build maintenance. Currently, we are working on identifying concrete measures that projects can take to reduce the build maintenance overhead.