RT Journal Article T1 Which Builds Are Really Safe to Skip? Maximizing Failure Observation for Build Selection in Continuous Integration. A1 Jin, Xianhao A1 Servant-Cortés, Francisco Javier K1 Soporte lógico - Mantenimiento K1 Soporte lógico - Verificación AB Continuous integration (CI) is a widely used practice in modern software engineering. Unfortunately, it is also an expensive practice. Google and Mozilla estimate their expenses for their CI systems in millions of dollars. To reduce the cost of CI, researchers developed multiple approaches to reduce its computational workload requirements. However, these approaches sometimes make mispredictions and skip failing builds which are not desirable to be skipped. Thus, in this paper, we aim to save computational cost in CI, while also maximizing the observation of failing builds, i.e., to skip builds more safely. First, we perform empirical studies to understand which builds are safe to skip, starting from CI-Skip rules [1] that characterize builds that developers decide to skip. We observe that CI-Skip rules are not so safe as expected. We then develop a collection of CI-Run rules that can complement these rules. Based on our findings, we propose PreciseBuildSkip, a novel approach that maximizes build failure observation and reduces the cost of CI through the strategy of build selection. We evaluate our approach and results show that our approach saved more cost (5.5%) than the safest existing technique but reduced the falsely skipped failing builds from 4.1% to 0% (median value). PB Elsevier YR 2022 FD 2022-03-08 LK https://hdl.handle.net/10630/34524 UL https://hdl.handle.net/10630/34524 LA eng NO Xianhao Jin and Francisco Servant. 2022. Which builds are really safe to skip? Maximizing failure observation for build selection in continuous integration. In Journal of Systems and Software (JSS) 188, June 2022, 111292, 18 pages. NO This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under award CCF-2046403, and by Universidad Rey Juan Carlos under the International Distinguished Researcher award C01INVESDIST. DS RIUMA. Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Málaga RD 23 ene 2026