PACE: A DSL-based Approach to Manage Complex Build Pipelines

Software development must be accelerated as much as possible in order to keep up with the fast-changing needs of the current market. When developing software products with complex architectures, one of the challenges is to handle dependencies between the (sub-)products developed by different teams. Namely during the validation stage, complex build pipelines need to be implemented, which may slow down the release of the software. The current strategies to implement build pipelines do not exploit abstraction, are often too restrictive in their application domain and require significant implementation, evolution, and maintenance efforts. We report our experience with an alternative approach that we believe combines for the first time the possibility of constructing a build pipeline architecture and at the same time all the automation logic. This allows for code reuse and inheritance. Our solution is in the form of a Domain-Specific Language called PACE, which we implemented and validated (in-house) in an industrial context. Our results provide evidence that in general, there are benefits in using PACE.