Measuring the benefits of CI/CD practices for database application development

Abstract

Modern software development practices automate software integration and reduce repetitive software engineering work. Automation reduces the time it takes from defining software requirements to deploying the software in production. However, when it comes to database applications, the database integration and deployment are often executed manually, making it costly and error-prone. To mitigate this, we extended current software development methodologies by designing a CI/CD pipeline that takes into consideration the database setting. We report on two industrial case studies in which we implemented a newly designed pipeline and we measure the benefits of integration and deployment automation in database development projects. From a quantitative perspective, we found that introducing CI/CD pipelines reduces failed deployments, improves stability and increases the number of executed deployments. From a qualitative perspective, we interviewed the developers before and after the implementation of the CI/CD pipeline and the results show the CI/CD pipeline brings clear benefits to the development team (i.e., reduced cognitive load). This finding puts current database release practices driven by business expectations such as fixed release windows in question.