Software development has gotten more complex and certain parts being more and more automated. Continuous integration practices with automated build and testing greatly benefit the development process. Combined with continuous deployment, the software can go directly from commit to deployment within hours or days which means that every commit is a possible deployment. The ability to trace links between artifacts is known as software traceability which has become a necessity and requirement in the industry. Following these traces and the ability to answer questions and base decisions on them is a complex problem. Tools already used in the industry are hard to adapt since every stakeholder requires different needs. Eiffel protocol aims to be as flexible and scalable as possible to fit as many needs as necessary for the stakeholder. This thesis provides an extension to Eiffel-store, an already existing open-source application that can visualize events in the Eiffel protocol that will be extended with functionality so that it can filter events and answer some questions stakeholders might have.

The current migration of companies towards continuous integration and delivery as well all service-oriented business models brings great benefits but also challenges. One challenge that a company striving to establish continuous practices is the need for pipeline traceability, which can bring great enhancements to continuous integration and delivery pipelines as well as offer a competitive edge. This exploratory case study looks at the current and desired states at Axis Communications, a global leader in network video solutions based in Lund, Sweden. It further evaluates the practical and organizational aspects of the adoption of the Eiffel protocol in the company’s pipeline tools through developing a proof-of-concept Eiffel plugin for Artifactory. Based on the discovered technical and organizational needs and obstacles, it draws conclusions and makes recommendations on a possible strategy when introducing Eiffel in a company.

The Eiffel Protocol provides traceability downstream and upstream of all activities that transpire inside the CI/CD pipeline. The traceability achieved by the Eiffel Protocol comes with great benefits even though it does not cover all development activities as it pertains only to the CI/CD pipeline. Our research aims to explore the idea of extending the Eiffel Protocol to cover all activities and discuss what benefits could be seen, especially in the scope of reducing the number of integration failures. A literature study was first carried out to find the root causes of these failures. After the literature study, we conducted a focus group session to gather data about the potential benefits and problems of an extension, what analyses could be drawn, and how it can affect integration errors. Our results show that an extension is beneficial as analyses that can be made with the generated data can tackle some of the biggest issues found in software development teams, especially in larger organizations. The complexity, cost involved and the time needed to see a return on investment does however weigh it down. Thus, while it is beneficial it is not enough for organizations to consider it as a priority to integrate with their environments when thinking of the costs involved to do so. Further implementation solutions need to be researched before it shows its worth.