Automatic Building Of Java Projects On GitHub: A Study On Reproducibility

Abstract: Software build tools like Maven and Gradle help us automate projects’ build phase but still require developers to be involved. To allow software engineers to work with multiple projects with high productivity, they need to be able to build them efficiently. In this paper, we studied automatic build tools: Maven, Gradle, and Ant, by executing the default build command on the top 300 Java Projects from Github. After gathering the projects which failed to build by using the default commands, we tried to configure the build process to get a successful result manually. The root causes of build failures were presented in 8 categories and compared to a previous paper that did similar research on the top 200 Java projects from Github. Results showed that 157 (52%) projects failed to build using default build commands, compared to the previous paper, which got 49%. The major root causes of build failures we found in this study were test failures (49%), compilation error (6%), dependency error(10%), dedicated command (7%), and file setup (24%). About 89% of the build failures could be resolved.