Supporting continuous integration by mashing-up software quality information

Continuous Integration (CI) has become an established best practice of modern software development. Its philosophy of regularly integrating the changes of individual developers with the mainline code base saves the entire development team from descending into Integration Hell, a term coined in the field of extreme programming. In practice CI is supported by automated tools to cope with this repeated integration of source code through automated builds, testing, and deployments. Currently available products, for example, Jenkins-CI, SonarQube or GitHub, allow for the implementation of a seamless CI-process. One of the main problems, however, is that relevant information about the quality and health of a software system is both scattered across those tools and across multiple views. We address this challenging problem by raising awareness of quality aspects and tailor this information to particular stakeholders, such as developers or testers. For that we present a quality awareness framework and platform called SQA-Mashup. It makes use of the service-based mashup paradigm and integrates information from the entire CI-toolchain in a single service. To evaluate its usefulness we conducted a user study. It showed that SQA-Mashup's single point of access allows to answer questions regarding the state of a system more quickly and accurately than standalone CI-tools.