Releasing Fast and Slow: An Exploratory Case Study at ING

E. Kula, Ayushi Rastogi, Hennie Huijgens, Arie van Deursen, Georgios Gousios

Research output: Chapter in Book/Conference proceedings/Edited volumeConference contributionScientificpeer-review

5 Citations (Scopus)
1874 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

The appeal of delivering new features faster has led many software projects to adopt rapid releases. However, it is not well understood what the effects of this practice are. This paper presents an exploratory case study of rapid releases at ING, a large banking company that develops software solutions in-house, to characterize rapid releases. Since 2011, ING has shifted to a rapid release model. This switch has resulted in a mixed environment of 611 teams releasing relatively fast and slow. We followed a mixed-methods approach in which we conducted a survey with 461 participants and corroborated their perceptions with 2 years of code quality data and 1 year of release delay data. Our research shows that: rapid releases are more commonly delayed than their non-rapid counterparts, however, rapid releases have shorter delays; rapid releases can be beneficial in terms of reviewing and user-perceived quality; rapidly released software tends to have a higher code churn, a higher test coverage and a lower average complexity; challenges in rapid releases are related to managing dependencies and certain code aspects, e.g. design debt.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationESEC/FSE 2019
Subtitle of host publicationProceedings of the 2019 27th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering
EditorsMarlon Dumas, Dietmar Pfahl
Place of PublicationNew York
PublisherACM DL
Pages785-795
Number of pages11
ISBN (Electronic)978-1-4503-5572-8
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2019
Event27th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, ESEC/FSE 2019: The 27th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering - Tallinn, Estonia
Duration: 26 Aug 201930 Aug 2019

Conference

Conference27th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, ESEC/FSE 2019
Country/TerritoryEstonia
CityTallinn
Period26/08/1930/08/19

Keywords

  • Rapid release
  • Release delay
  • Software quality
  • Technical debt

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