Mining Our Way Back to Incremental Builds for DevOps Pipelines

The incremental build is a key feature of build automation tools. It still plays a key role in the build systems that underpin DevOps pipelines. Yet it is quite common for these "upper layer" automation technologies to start from a clean copy of the codebase, rendering the incremental builds inert. In this tutorial, we discuss why it is desirable to restore the incremental build features of the past. We also describe past and ongoing work that strives to make DevOps pipelines operate incrementally again. Finally, we discuss perceived barriers to adoption that our past solutions have faced.