StalkCD: A Model-Driven Framework for Interoperability and Analysis of CI/CD Pipelines

Today, most Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD) solutions use infrastructure as code to describe the pipeline-based build and deployment process. Each solution uses its own format to describe the CI/CD pipeline, which hinders the interoperability and the analysis of CI/CD pipelines. In this paper, we propose a model-driven DSL-based framework for CI/CD pipeline definition and analysis. It comprises (i) the analysis of the meta-model of the Jenkins pipeline definition language, (ii) the StalkCD domain-specific language providing a base for interoperability and transformation between different formats, and (iii) an extensible set of transformations between tool-specific CI/CD definitions and analysis tools. We demonstrate the specific support for Jenkins as a CI/CD tool and BPMN for exploiting analyses from the workflow domain and visualizing the results. We evaluate the DSL and the transformations empirically based on more than 1,000 publicly available Jenkinsfiles. The evaluation shows that our framework supports 70% of these files without information loss.