Real-Time Failure Event Streaming of Continuous Integration Builds

Abstract: An application build describes compiling and linking the source code of a developed application to libraries and executables. A Continuous Integration (CI) build executes such a build after the source code has been changed and tries to integrate the changes into the existing application. Such CI builds are executed automatically and include automated software tests, which give the developer the assurance that the changes are technically correct. When the time between the discovery of a test failure and the notification to the developer about it is too long, the development process will be impacted negatively and the beneficial effects of CI decrease. Even though several companies already have CI systems that display all events of a single CI build on a terminal during runtime, bigger applications often involve several CI builds in a single CI pipeline to integrate code changes. Observing the events of these CI builds during runtime might require concurrent monitoring of several different terminals. This thesis overcomes this issue by developing a Proof of Concept (PoC) which streams the test failures of a whole CI pipeline in real-time to the developer. To show the feasibility of real-time failure event streaming of CI builds, the PoC is implemented within Spotify’s CI for clientfacing applications. The issues highlighted by this initial PoC will help to refine the whole CI practice. Furthermore, the faster feedback cycles realised by this PoC will lead to a productivity, efficiency and happiness increase for the involved developers and, eventually, higher quality of the developed software.