To meet market demand for products that are delivered faster, while also delivering high-quality products, businesses are seeking to streamline and accelerate the design, development, and delivery process. The DevOps methodology addresses automation and faster delivery processes. Platforms such as GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Azure DevOps, and Jenkins are commonly used to specify automation pipelines. With the proliferation of these platforms, it has become more difficult to analyze pipelines across individual platforms. An analysis environment that abstracts from individual platforms and can understand several pipeline dialects could address these issues.

In this paper, we present a language and an Xtext-based editor for the analysis of multi-platform pipeline specifications that covers dialects from the GitHub Actions, GitLab, BitBucket, Bamboo, Circle CI, and Azure DevOps platforms. Furthermore, we present a heterogeneous dataset of automation pipelines from different platforms. We conducted a systematic analysis of existing pipeline specifications before defining the multi-platform language, and we mined and preprocessed 42,106 pipelines from open-source projects such as GitHub and Software Heritage for validation.

According to our results, the proposed editor successfully parsed 40,160 pipelines after applying minor pre-processing. Based on a random sample of the remaining 1,946 pipelines, these pipelines were not parsed successfully due a malformed pipeline specification, or the files being intended for other purposes. The proposed analysis environment including language, editor, and dataset paves the way for further cross-platform analysis of automation pipelines. To demonstrate a use case for the analysis environment, we identify five distinct pipeline specification patterns from the successfully parsed pipelines to better understand common pipeline usage.