ANALYSIS OF STRUCTURAL OPTIMIZATION METHODS FOR CONTINUOUS INTEGRATION PIPELINES
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.32782/IT/2024-3-14Keywords:
Continuous Integration, structural optimization, software development, software maintenance, computational optimizationAbstract
Continuous Integration (CI) is an essential practice in modern software development. This paper focuses on analyzing the practical efficiency of applying structural optimization techniques to continuous integration pipelines. The objective of this work is to review and evaluate the practical efficiency of various structural optimization techniques applied to continuous integration pipelines in diverse software environments. Methodology: A comprehensive literature review was conducted, focusing on publications from the past ten years to capture recent advancements and emerging trends in CI efficiency improvements. The systematic search of academic databases used keywords such as «Continuous Integration», «CI optimization», «direct acyclic graph», «tasks prioritization», «incremental builds», and «parallel testing». Inclusion criteria ensured the selection of highquality studies, including peer-reviewed journal articles, conference papers, and industry reports. Articles that did not explicitly focus on CI efficiency improvements or lacked empirical evidence were excluded from the review. Additionally, an experiment was conducted to perform a comparative analysis of the effectiveness and applicability of various optimization techniques across different software solutions: S1 – A legacy multi-module monolithic system; S2 – A web-based application with service-oriented architecture; S3 – A modern cloud-native application; S4 – An Infrastructure as a Code solution with a complex multi-staging pipeline; S5 – A test automation solution focused on multi-staged end-to-end tests. The results of applying each optimization technique were thoroughly documented to support final conclusions. The effectiveness analysis is based on the critical path length analysis of a directed acyclic graph representation of the Continuous Integration pipeline. The novelty of this research lies in using comparative analysis to evaluate the efficiency of applying various structural optimization techniques to complex software solutions in hybrid environments. The results of the research highlighted the uneven impact of each structural optimization technique on Continuous Integration pipeline efficiency across the different solutions. While an overall trend toward more effective pipeline execution is evident in each case, the effectiveness of each evaluated method varies from one solution to another. This variation appears to depend on multiple factors, including the technology stack, solution size, inherent limitations, and the size and complexity of the Continuous Integration pipeline. Identifying these factors, as well as evaluating structural optimization techniques on a larger scale to determine correlations between these factors and pipeline efficiency, could be a focus for future research.
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