Interviewing the Most Successful Bot on GitHub: Dr Travis CI on 35+ Million of its Jobs.

Travis CI handles automatically thousands of builds every day to, amongst other things, provide valuable feedback to thousands of open-source developers. It can be regarded as a bot that automatically triggers an execution each time a developer interacts with the source code of a repository. In this paper, we interview Travis CI to answer four original research questions about: 1) who is using Travis CI, 2) when they start to use it, 3) for which purposes they use it and finally 4) how Travis CI configurations evolve. We share the biggest benchmark of Travis CI jobs (to our knowledge): it contains 35 793 144 jobs from 272 917 different GitHub projects.