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 language | English |
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Title of host publication | ESEC/FSE 2019 |
Subtitle of host publication | Proceedings of the 2019 27th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering |
Editors | Marlon Dumas, Dietmar Pfahl |
Place of Publication | New York |
Publisher | ACM DL |
Pages | 785-795 |
Number of pages | 11 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 978-1-4503-5572-8 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2019 |
Event | 27th 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 2019 → 30 Aug 2019 |
Conference
Conference | 27th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, ESEC/FSE 2019 |
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Country/Territory | Estonia |
City | Tallinn |
Period | 26/08/19 → 30/08/19 |
Keywords
- Rapid release
- Release delay
- Software quality
- Technical debt