PIPELINEASCODE: A CI/CD Workflow Management System through Configuration Files at ByteDance

Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) are widely used practices in modern software engineering. Unfortunately, it is also an expensive and complicated practice - setting up a CI/CD pipeline can be time-consuming and error-prone. CI/CD pipelines at ByteDance can be set up and modified through the user interface by dragging each atom onto the screen to maximize its customizability. However, these operations increase the difficulty of reuse and version tracking. In this work, we design PIPELINEASCODE as a CI/CD workflow management system using configuration files to provide high portability and traceability. PIPELINEASCODE is seamlessly integrated with the CI/CD system at ByteDance which is named as “ByteCycle”. We also assess PIPELINEASCODE in two dimensions to determine its strengths by addressing two key questions: what types of pipelines developers prefer to manage using PIPELINEASCODE, and how pipelines evolve after the adoption of PIPELINEASCODE. The evaluation results show that pipelines managed by PIPELINEASCODE generally have a higher build frequency, fewer steps, a higher change frequency, a lower success rate and a longer build duration. After the adoption of PIPELINEASCODE, pipelines tend to have fewer steps, a higher build frequency, a longer build duration, a higher success rate and a higher change frequency. The results show that PIPELINEASCODE is capable of improving the reliability and flexibility of CI/CD pipelines and thus encourages users to build and deploy more frequently.