Statically Verifying Continuous Integration Configurations

Abstract: Continuous Integration (CI) testing is a popular software development technique that allows developers to easily check that their code can build successfully and pass tests across various system environments. In order to use a CI platform, a developer must include a set of configuration files to a code repository for specifying build conditions. Incorrect configuration settings lead to CI build failures, which can take hours to run, wasting valuable developer time and delaying product release dates. Debugging CI configurations is challenging because users must manage configurations for the build across many system environments, to which they may not have local access. Thus, the only way to check a CI configuration is to push a commit and wait for the build result. To address this problem, we present the first approach, VeriCI, for statically checking for errors in a given CI configuration before the developer pushes a commit to build on the CI server. Our key insight is that the repositories in a CI environment contain lists of build histories which offer the time-aware repository build status. Driven by this insight, we introduce the Misclassification Guided Abstraction Refinement (MiGAR) loop that automates part of the learning process across the heterogeneous build environments in CI. We then use decision tree learning to generate constraints on the CI configuration that must hold for a build to succeed by training on a large history of continuous integration repository build results. We evaluate VeriCI on real-world data from GitHub and find that we have 83% accuracy of predicting a build failure.