Developer-Applied Accelerations in Continuous Integration: A Detection Approach and Catalog of Patterns

Continuous Integration (CI) provides a feedback loop for the change sets that developers produce. It is crucial that CI processes change sets quickly to provide timely feedback to developers and enable teams to release software updates rapidly. Prior work has made several advances in proposing automated approaches to speed up CI builds. While these approaches have been broadly adopted, CI platforms are flexible enough to enable teams to produce custom strategies to optimize or omit unnecessary or redundant tasks (i.e., developer-applied accelerations). Exploring developer-applied accelerations and identifying recurrent patterns within them may enable broader reuse and can inform recommendations to enhance software development efficiency.