Software professionals' information needs in continuous integration and delivery

Abstract

Continuous integration and delivery consolidate several activities, ranging from frequent code changes to compiling, building, testing, and deployment to customers. During these activities, software professionals seek additional information to perform the task at hand. Developers that spend a considerable amount of time and effort to identify such information can be distracted from doing productive work. By identifying the types of information that software professionals seek, we can better understand the processes, practices, and tools that are required to develop a quality product on time. A better understanding of the information needs of software practitioners has several benefits, such as staying competitive, increasing awareness of the issues that can hinder a timely release, and building a visualization tool that can help practitioners to address their information needs.

Azeem Ahmad

PhD Candidate in Software Engineering

The focus of my research is to use machine learning and AI methods to solve real-time problems related to continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD), software test optimization, and data visualization in CI/CD in European Industries (i.e., https://www.software-center.se/partners/) that are part of the software center (www.software-center.se). I investigate and optimize the Continuous Integration and Delivery pipeline and how to visualize data streams, currently flowing in the pipeline. In addition to this, a part of my research is to optimize software testing and quality.