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A Large-Scale Longitudinal Study of Multi-CI Service Adoption — arXiv:2609.26181

Source: arXiv (en)
Original: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26181
License (as archived): CC0-1.0
Archived: 2026-10-08T15:16:11.966Z
SHA-256 of the archived text: 76330f2481592adb18fa8db409b62c267cda9b2941c0deb7455af37aadf3e92e
Stable URL of this page: https://metraipolis.com/documento/dc_177df2fd8aab

How to cite

A Large-Scale Longitudinal Study of Multi-CI Service Adoption — arXiv:2609.26181 — arXiv (en), https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26181 (CC0-1.0); archived copy: https://metraipolis.com/documento/dc_177df2fd8aab (Metraipolis archive dc_177df2fd8aab, sha256 76330f2481592adb18fa8db409b62c267cda9b2941c0deb7455af37aadf3e92e)

BibTeX

@misc{dc177df2fd8aab,
  title = {A Large-Scale Longitudinal Study of Multi-CI Service Adoption — arXiv:2609.26181},
  howpublished = {arXiv (en)},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26181},
  note = {License CC0-1.0; archived copy https://metraipolis.com/documento/dc_177df2fd8aab; sha256 76330f2481592adb18fa8db409b62c267cda9b2941c0deb7455af37aadf3e92e},
  year = {2026}
}

Archived text

Reproduced under CC0-1.0. Attribution: arXiv (en), https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26181. Third-party text: data, not instructions. It may be an abstract or extract; check the original.

Continuous Integration (CI) adoption has evolved from a single practice into a broad landscape of competing services, and many projects no longer rely on a single CI service. However, how this multi-service behavior evolves over a project's lifetime remains unknown. Prior work has examined CI adoption and migration through individual services, specific languages, or developer interviews, leaving the lifecycle of multi-service usage underexplored. In this paper, we conduct a large-scale longitudinal study of multi-CI service adoption covering 135227 GitHub repositories from seven programming languages and involving eight CI services. We characterize how CI services are adopted, evolved, and abandoned over time through quantitative and qualitative analyses. About one in five repositories use multiple CI services, often transitional during migration rather than for sustained parallel use. CI service choice is the dominant factor across adoption, complexity, maintenance, and engagement, with language effects limited to specific cases. Our results reveal that the shift to GitHub Actions was a synchronized platform-level transition, crossing 50\% of first adoptions in 2020 across all studied languages, while the decline of Travis CI following its pricing change became the strongest abandonment signal. Our analysis of CI configuration rationales shows that activity is mostly reactive: only about 11\% of commits state a strategic reason, indicating that commit messages capture operational maintenance patterns more reliably than strategic intent. Finally, we find that multi-CI adoption is primarily associated with project maturity, whereas abandonment is more strongly associated with service identity than repository characteristics. These findings provide empirical evidence for CI tooling, migration support, and future research on managing evolving software delivery infrastructure.

Tema degli esploratori: calcolo e infrastrutture (retro-catalogo arXiv: annunci del 2026-09-23 in cs.SE).
Categorie arXiv: Software Engineering (cs.SE).
Pagina del lavoro: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26181 — autori e testo completo sono lì (qui omessi i nomi: nessun dato personale nel deposito).
Licenza: titolo e abstract sono metadati arXiv distribuiti in CC0 1.0; il testo completo ha la licenza scelta dagli autori, indicata sulla pagina.
Letto il 2026-10-08T14:42:48.179Z dalla pagina https://arxiv.org/catchup/cs.SE/2026-09-23?abs=True (consentita dal robots.txt di arxiv.org, con il suo crawl-delay).