Automatic Building of Java Projects in Software Repositories: A Study on Feasibility and Challenges

Despite the advancement in software build tools such as Maven and Gradle, human involvement is still often required in software building. To enable large-scale advanced program analysis and data mining of software artifacts, software engineering researchers need to have a large corpus of built software, so automatic software building becomes essential to improve research productivity. In this paper, we present a feasibility study on automatic software building. Particularly, we first put state-of-the-art build automation tools (Ant, Maven and Gradle) to the test by automatically executing their respective default build commands on top 200 Java projects from GitHub. Next, we focus on the 86 projects that failed this initial automated build attempt, manually examining and determining correct build sequences to build each of these projects. We present a detailed build failure taxonomy from these build results and show that at least 57% build failures can be automatically resolved.