Data in DevOps and Its Importance in Code Analytics

Introduction

Robust DevOps plays a huge role in the health and sanity of software and the metadata generated during this activity need to be harnessed for deriving useful insights. This area of work can be classified as Code Analytics and comprises of the following (but not limited to) –

• 1.

  Commit history from the Source Code Management system (SCM)

• 2.

  The engineers that worked on the commit

• 3.

  The reviewers on the commit

• 4.

  The extent of build (if applicable) & test validation prior to the commit, the types of failures found in iterative processes & the fixes done

• 5.

  Test extent of test coverage on the commit

• 6.

  Any static profiling on the code in the commit

• 7.

  The size and complexity of the commit

The proposed chapter introduces the various attributes that are available during DevOps, means to use them effectively and their application in source code analytics that can help produce good quality software at increasing velocity. Each section also gives a pictorial view of the role played by each metadata and how they can be represented visually for effective insights.

Section 1 describes how commit history can be used to derive BugSpots/BugCache (Rahman, et al, 2011). The techniques in this paper are extended to give a ‘phase-containment’ view to bugs / commits which is used in Cisco systems by the author.

Section 2 dwells into the code review practices and the meta data that is available during this activity and its application for sound peer reviews in the development life cycle. An effective illustration around this is described in the papers Search-Based Peer Reviewers Recommendation in Modern Code Review (Ouni, et al, 2016) and A Large-Scale Study on Source Code Reviewer Recommendation (Lipcˇak & Rossi, 2018).

Section 3 forays into code coverage measures from various test cycles and its potential use in determining efficacy of the test activities, a paper in this area of note is Examining the Effectiveness of Testing Coverage Tools: An Empirical Study (Alemerien & Magel, 2014).

Section 4 goes into static analysis and static profiling of software, which is one of the earliest indicators of quality and stability of software. This uses recommendations described in the papers Structured Testing: A Testing Methodology Using the Cyclomatic Complexity Metric (Watson & McCabe, 1996) and The Correlation among Software Complexity Metrics with Case Study (Dr. Tashtoush, et al, 2014).

Section 5 leverages the study on cyclomatic complexity analysis (Watson & Mccabe, 1996) to expand its use in code analytics.

Section 6 ventures into the DevOps workflow itself and why it is relevant to interject many of the earlier insights right into the CI/CD (Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery) pipeline. It also circles around the first five sections and how they contribute to meta data necessary for code analytics.