"Good" and "Bad" Failures in Industrial CI/CD -- Balancing Cost and Quality Assurance

Abstract: Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline automates software development to speed up and enhance the efficiency of engineering software. These workflows consist of various jobs, such as code validation and testing, which developers must wait to complete before receiving feedback. The jobs can fail, which leads to unnecessary delays in build times, decreasing productivity for developers, and increasing costs for companies. To explore how companies adopt CI/CD workflows and balance cost with quality assurance during optimization, we studied 4 companies, reporting industry experiences with CI/CD practices. Our findings reveal that organizations can confuse the distinction between CI and CD, whereas code merge and product release serve as more effective milestones for process optimization and risk control. While numerous tools and research efforts target the post-merge phase to enhance productivity, limited attention has been given to the pre-merge phase, where early failure prevention brings more impacts and less risks.