Performance comparison and assessment of GitHub Actions and Jenkins

Abstract: There is a great demand for fast deliveries of improved and updated software in different software development areas, like Internet of Things, web, and cloud, in today’s digitalized world. Software developers and organizations must adapt to be able to deliver according to customers’ wishes, to be able to retain them, and remain competitive with other organizations. Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) are methods used within the software development world, allowing developers to automate parts of their work to develop and deliver software faster and with better quality. Tools used for CI/CD come with different benefits and performances making it difficult for developers to choose a tool. There are numerous tools to choose from, and there is a lack of performance comparisons of them. This thesis aims to give developers a performance comparison between the two well-known CI/CD tools, GitHub Actions and Jenkins, to facilitate their choice of a CI/CD tool. The research was qualitative, inductive, and comparative. A literature study and practical tests were conducted to study the performance differences between the two wellknown CI/CD tools, GitHub Actions and Jenkins. The literature study was conducted f irst and gave the necessary knowledge to perform the practical tests, and the practical tests gave the actual results. The practical tests were performed on two different software projects ,and two different tests per projec, per server were conducted. The results from both projects indicated apparent differences in performance between GitHub Actions and Jenkins, as Jenkins ran faster than GitHub Actions while running on a Windows server, and GitHub Actions ran faster than Jenkins while running on an Ubuntu server. These findings indicate that the two well-known CI/CD tools perform differently depending on the server the developers would use these tools. It can not be concluded that one of the tools has better performance than the other; instead, one tool has better performance depending on the operating system the tool is running on. If the developers were to use the tools on an Ubuntu server, GitHub Actions would be the preferred tool, and if they were to use the tool on a Windows server, Jenkins would be the preferred tool.