Analyzing the Effects of CI/CD on Open Source Repositories in GitHub and GitLab

Abstract

Numerous articles emphasize the benefits of implementing Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines in software development. These pipelines are expected to improve a project’s reputation and decrease the number of commits and issues in the repository. Although CI/CD adoption may be slow initially, it is believed to accelerate service delivery and deployment in the long run. This study aims to investigate the impact of CI/CD on commit velocity and issue counts in two open-source repositories, GitLab and GitHub. By analyzing more than 12,000 repositories and recording every commit and issue, it was discovered that CI/CD enhances commit velocity by 141.19% but also increases the number of issues by 321.21%.