A Quality Framework for Software Continuous Integration

Abstract

The research in this paper combines two main areas, the first one is software quality and the second is the agile practices of continuous integration. Software quality has been an important topic since the beginning of the software development and production. Many researches have been conducted to discuss how the quality of software is a critical factor to its success [1–5]. Because software became an important part of almost every task in our daily life, having high quality software that meets the users’ expectations is important [6]. Software integration is a stage in every software development lifecycle, it is defined as the process to assemble the software components and produce a single product. It has been shown that software integration and integration testing can make more than 40% of the overall project cost, so it is important that they are done efficiently and easily to be able to manage the involved risks [7]. A software engineering practice called continuous integration (CI) was introduced by Kent Beck and Ron Jeffries to mitigate the risks of software integration, enhance its process and improve its quality [8]. In this research, the principles of CI are identified and applied to a case study in order to analyze their impact on the software development process quality factors.