Investigating Information about Software Requirements in Projects That Use Continuous Integration or Not: An Exploratory Study

Continuous Integration (CI) is a development practice that involves the automation of compilation and testing procedures, increasing the frequency of code integration and the delivery of new features and providing improvements in software quality. Open Source Software (OSS) projects are increasingly associated with the use of CI practices. However, the literature has not yet explored how and if this practice can influence the presence and the types of artifacts and information related to requirements. Thus, this study aimed to investigate the presence, types of artifacts, and information related to requirements found in projects on GitHub, in particular projects that use CI. An exploratory methodology was used to identify and classify the requirements artifacts where the result shows that projects that adopt the CI have, in general, a more amount of requirements artifacts, mainly in artifacts of the GitHub platform such as issues, pull requests, and labels.