Modelling CI/CD Pipeline Through Agent-Based Simulation

The need for rapid and efficient software development pushes the demand for automation in the phases of build, test, and release. Thereby, the methodology of Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) emerges, which then gives birth to a set of CI/CD enabling services, such as Travis CI and Jenkins. Those services facilitate the automatic compilation, connection tracking, and packaging of new features. They not only incorporate playgrounds for testing and functionality verification but also enable the final delivery.Poor understanding and execution in CI/CD operations can result in slowing and even halting the pace of a software project. Many bottlenecks of CI/CD pipeline might occur due to its incorrect configurations, i.e. the inadequate level of automation, the unsuitable load capacity and the suboptimal queueing strategy. However, understanding the actual CI/CD pipeline is hard since its performance varies significantly with different hosting machines, technologies and plugins. On the other hand, finding a way to analyse and improve the settings of CI/CD pipeline brings great managerial and economic benefits since an optimal configuration implies the eventual high efficiency. To that end, this study attempts to design a model that can not only capture the abstraction of the pipeline but also provides a testing environment for the impersonal influencers of CI/CD performance. The current study, therefore, aims to contribute (1) a pipeline model based on the logic of the queueing system and enabled by agent-based simulation, and (2) an experimental environment which allows the testing of different settings and operation scenarios.