Insights into Continuous Integration Build Failures

Continuous integration is prevalently used in modern software engineering to build software systems automatically. Broken builds hinder developers' work and delay project progress. We must identify the factors causing build failures. This paper presents a large empirical study to identify the factors such as, complexity of a task, build strategy and contribution models (i.e., push and pull request), and projects level attributes (i.e., sizes of projects and teams), which potentially have impacts on the build results. We have studied 3.6 million builds over 1,090 open-source projects. The derived results add to our understanding of the role of those factors on build results, which can be used in minimizing build failures.