Researchers, students and practitioners often encounter a situation when the build process of a third-party software system fails. In this paper, we aim to confirm this observation present mainly as anecdotal evidence so far. Using a virtual environment simulating a programmer's one, we try to fully automatically build target archives from the source code of over 7,200 open source Java projects. We found that more than 38% of builds ended in failure. Build log analysis reveals the largest portion of errors are dependency-related. We also conduct an association study of factors affecting build success.
@article{arxiv.1712.01024,
title = {A Quantitative Study of Java Software Buildability},
author = {Matúš Sulír and Jaroslav Porubän},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1712.01024},
year = {2017}
}