Automated Construction of Continuous Delivery Pipelines from Architecture Models

Continuous Delivery (CD) aims at reducing the cycle time from changes to software release while also increasing the software quality. To automate CD, delivery process models, defining all delivery activities need to be designed. Quality properties of delivery process models, such as maintainability, still oppose challenges. Previous research indicates that the quality of such models can be improved by aligning them with the software architecture. While software architecture knowledge is only incorporated implicitly, deep technical and process knowledge is required. On this basis, this paper introduces a new kind of delivery process models that focus mainly on software architecture knowledge. Hereby, we discard the current activity-centric view and shift to an artifact-centric view. Moreover, we outsource the required process- and technical knowledge to a transformation activities knowledge base. In order to make an artifact-based delivery process model executable, we provide a model-to-model transformation which constructs a CD pipeline from an artifact-based model with the help of the transformation activities knowledge base. We evaluated our approach by conducting a small industrial qualitative user study. It showed that low-experienced developers benefit from the reduced knowledge requirements of the artifact-based modeling approach.