Mohammad Javad Beheshtian

dblp:326/9331 · DBLP profile ↗
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1ranked-venue papers
1as first author
1since 2021 · last 2022
0000-0002-4589-8374ORCID · reported

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Software engineering, systems software and programming languages · 1 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021

Expertise — from the expertise taxonomy: the topics of the expert's papers under the CCF categories. A weight counts papers with recency: 1 for a paper about the topic, 0.3 when the topic is its context, halved every five years.

Software engineering, system software, and programming languages
1 paper
Software maintenance and evolution · 56% Debugging and program repair · 44%

Topics — the 2 heaviest of 3, each with the papers that count most for it

TopicWeightPapersLastEvidence papers
Debugging and program repair
bisection
0.612022
Software Batch Testing to Save Build Test Resources and to Reduce Feedback Time · IEEE Trans. Software Eng. 2022
Software maintenance and evolution › release engineering
continuous integration
0.612022
Software Batch Testing to Save Build Test Resources and to Reduce Feedback Time · IEEE Trans. Software Eng. 2022

Methods — techniques the papers use, named apart from their topics

risk modeling · 0.6bisection · 0.6
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2022 Software Batch Testing to Save Build Test Resources and to Reduce Feedback Time
abstract
Testing is expensive and batching tests has the potential to reduce test costs. The continuous integration strategy of testing each commit or change individually helps to quickly identify faults but leads to a maximal number of test executions. Large companies that have a massive number of commits, e.g., Google and Facebook, or have expensive test infrastructure, e.g., Ericsson, must batch changes together to reduce the number of total test runs. For example, if eight builds are batched together and there is no failure, then we have tested eight builds with one execution saving seven executions. However, when a failure occurs it is not immediately clear which build is the cause of the failure. A bisection is run to isolate the failing build, i.e., the culprit build. In our eight builds example, a failure will require an additional 6 executions, resulting in a saving of one execution. In this work, we re-evaluate batching approaches developed in industry on large open source projects using Travis CI. We also introduce novel batching approaches. In total, we evaluate six approaches. The first is the baseline approach that tests each build individually. The second, is the existing bisection approach. The third uses a batch size of four, which we show mathematically reduces the number of execution without requiring bisection. The fourth combines the two prior techniques introducing a stopping condition to the bisection. The final two approaches use models of build change risk to isolate risky changes and test them in smaller batches. We find that compared to the TestAll baseline, on average, the approaches reduce the number ofbuild test executionsacross projects by 46, 48, 50, 44, and 49 percent for BatchBisect, Batch4, BatchStop4, RiskTopN, and RiskBatch, respectively. The greatest reduction in executions is BatchStop4 at 50 percent. However, the simple approach of Batch4 does not require bisection and achieves a reduction of 48 percent. In a larger sample of projects, we find that a project’s failure rate is strongly correlated with execution savings (Spearman$r = -0.97$with a$p \ll 0.001$). Using Batch4, 85 percent of projects see savings. All projects that have build failures less than 40 percent of the time will benefit from batching. In terms offeedback time, compared to TestAll, we find that BatchBisect, Batch2, Batch4, BatchStop4 all reduce the average feedback time by 33, 16, 32, and 37 percent. Simple batching saves not only resources but also reduces feedback time without introducing any slip-throughs and without changing the test run order. We suggest that most projects should adjust their CI pipelines to use a batch size of at least two. We release our scripts and data for replication1as well as theBatchBuildertool2that automatically batches submitted changes on GitHub for testing on Travis CI. Since the tool reports individual results for each pull-request or pushed commit, the batching happens in the background and the development process is unchanged.
Mohammad Javad Beheshtian, Amir Hossein Bavand, Peter C. Rigby
IEEE Trans. Software Eng.1