It’s time for the final part of the Travis CI Community Survey results. Check out part 1 and part 2 of the blog posts to learn about the most common languages, platforms, deployment targets and more. Today, we’ll be going over popular features and the improvements you requested.

Build Stages, Matrices, and Conditional builds - The Features of Travis CI

Let’s take a look at the features that are being used the most across Travis CI:

• With Build Stages you can make one job run if several other, parallel jobs have completed successfully. It’s one of the most commonly used features, about 65% of all private repos and 46% of open source projects use it according to your responses in the survey.

• Build Matrices, which enable you to test multiple configurations and languages in parallel with ease, are also familiar to may of you. For private projects, we’re looking at around 61%, but on public, open source projects, that number skyrockets to 80%.

• Allowed failures - marking certain matrix entries as not being necessary to continue - see around 16% use on the private side. Meanwhile, on public repositories, it’s at almost 40%.

• Conditional Builds, on the other hand, are more popular on private projects, at just shy of 50% (versus 37% on open source). Conditional Builds make it possible to configure Travis CI to only trigger builds when certain conditions are met.

• Cron Jobs give you the ability to set builds to automatically run on a daily, weekly, or monthly schedule. They are used by about 30% of you. You can configure cron jobs from the “Cron Jobs” settings tab on your Travis CI page.

• While building at Travis CI, you can pull Docker images to create your environment and build an Image from a Dockerfile, test, update it and push it to a Docker repository or to a registry. About 50% of the survey respondents are using Docker during build time.

What can we do better

The community that has grown around Travis CI is amazing, and we want to keep that momentum going. With that in mind, we asked what you’d like to see improved at Travis CI.

These questions had an open format and we went through each piece of feedback, assigned it to one or multiple categories, and tabulated these categories together. From these, we’d like to share the following common themes:

• Build Times. We are working on quite a few projects to improve build times. Build performance is always on our mind when preparing the product roadmap.

• UI Improvements. Specifically, making it easier to find build errors, and improving navigation were often mentioned.

• More Documentation. A lot of you ask for new examples and thorough guides, in addition to the current reference material.

• Outdated Images. Another thing that was brought up frequently were images being outdated. We recently released Xenial but understand quite a few of you are already eager to move on to Bionic Beaver. macOS 10.14 and Xcode 10.2 have just been released, which should make future developments on Mojave easier going forward.

• Windows. A lot of you are eager to see Windows support improve and go into full support, rather than just beta! We are too! We will be posting updates as soon as they become available. We do have a public early release version of Windows images available to anyone, and you can follow conversations around Windows here.

What’s next

The reason we started the survey was to learn about and from you. Our community is our pride and we’re so excited to give you a voice and a chance to really impact the way we build Travis CI. If you are wondering what’s in store for Travis CI in 2019, we cover a lot of our plans for the year in this blog post.

Thank you to each one of you who took the time to fill out the survey, shared how you use Travis CI, what you love about using it, and how you’d like it to evolve.

Make sure to join us in the Community Forum to discuss the results of the Travis CI Community Survey 2018.