Continuous integration in a social-coding world: Empirical evidence from GitHub. **Updated version with corrections**

摘要

Continuous integration is a software engineering practice of frequentlymerging all developer working copies with a shared main branch, e.g., severaltimes a day. With the advent of GitHub, a platform well known for its "socialcoding" features that aid collaboration and sharing, and currently the largestcode host in the open source world, collaborative software development hasnever been more prominent. In GitHub development one can distinguish betweentwo types of developer contributions to a project: direct ones, coming from atypically small group of developers with write access to the main projectrepository, and indirect ones, coming from developers who fork the mainrepository, update their copies locally, and submit pull requests for reviewand merger. In this paper we explore how GitHub developers use continuousintegration as well as whether the contribution type (direct versus indirect)and different project characteristics (e.g., main programming language, orproject age) are associated with the success of the automatic builds.