Developing Cross-Organisational Service-Based Software Systems through Decentralised Interface-Oriented Continuous Integration

Abstract

Continuous integration (CI) is a key practice where software developers integrate frequently via a shared repository to enable automated build, test, and release of software features. At the same time, digital economies are moving towards a service-oriented model with which software projects have become complex service-based systems orchestrated through service composition. While enabling CI in a centralised software development environment has been a common practice, little work has been done to optimally support CI in cross-organisational service-based software systems whose constituents are usually owned and managed by different organisations to only expose their interfaces. This paper presents a new decentralised interface-oriented CI model that is particularly optimised for supporting CI of cross-organisational service-based software systems. To demonstrate the viability and the effectiveness of the proposed approach, the paper further presents a proof-of-concept prototype that provides tool support, followed by an experimental evaluation that compares the prototype against an established technology stack for implementing CI using the service-oriented approach.