The Classics Never Go Out of Style: An Empirical Study of Downgrades from Bazel – Shane McIntosh, University of Waterloo
Enticed by advanced features, several software teams have migrated their build systems to a modern generation of build technologies, such as Bazel. However, not all migrations lead to perceived improvements, ultimately culminating in abandonment of the build technology. In this talk, we will present the results of our recent empirical study of 542 open-source projects that adopt Bazel. We observed that (1) 61 projects (11.2%) have abandoned Bazel; and (2) abandonment tends to occur after investing in Bazel for a substantial amount of time (a median of 638 days). Thematic analysis reveals seven recurring reasons for abandonment, such as technical challenges, lack of platform integration, team coordination issues, and upstream trends. After abandoning Bazel, the studied projects have adopted a broad set of alternatives, spanning from language-specific tools like Go Build, to more traditional build technologies like CMake and even pure Make.
