Towards Efficient Build Ordering for Incremental Builds with Multiple Configurations

Abstract

Software products have many configurations to meet different environments and diverse needs. Building software with multiple software configurations typically incurs high costs in terms of build time and computing resources. Incremental builds could reuse intermediate artifacts if configuration settings affect only a portion of the build artifacts. The efficiency gains depend on the strategic ordering of the incremental builds as the order influences which build artifacts can be reused. Deriving an efficient order is challenging and an open problem, since it is infeasible to reliably determine the degree of re-use and time savings before an actual build. In this paper, we propose an approach, called BUDDI—BUild Declaration DIstance, for C-based and Make-based projects to derive an efficient order for incremental builds from the static information provided by the build scripts (i.e., Makefile). The core strategy of BUDDI is to measure the distance between the build declarations of configurations and predict the build size of a configuration from the build targets and build commands in each configuration. Since some artifacts could be reused in the subsequent builds if there is a close distance between the build scripts for different configurations. We implemented BUDDI as an automated tool called BuddiPlanner and evaluated it on 20 popular open-source projects, by comparing it to a baseline that randomly selects a build order. The experimental results show that the order created by BuddiPlanner outperforms 96.5% (193/200) of the random build orders in terms of build time and reduces the build time by an average of 305.94s (26%) compared to the random build orders, with a median saving of 64.88s (28%). BuddiPlanner demonstrates its potential to relieve practitioners of excessive build times and computational resource burdens caused by building multiple software configurations.