An empirical study on visual programming docker compose configurations

• Type: Article in International Conference Proceedings Book
• Date: 2020

Authors

Piedade, B (Author) Other; Dias, JP (Author) FEUP; Filipe Figueiredo Correia (Author) FEUP

Conference proceedings International

Title: MODELS '20: ACM/IEEE 23rd International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems, Virtual Event, Canada, 18-23 October, 2020, Companion Proceedings

Initial page: 60:1

23rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems, MODELS-C 2020

16 October 2020 through 23 October 2020

Indexing

Scopus - 7 Citations

Other information

Authenticus ID: P-00S-ZMN

DOI: 10.1145/3417990.3420194

Abstract (EN): Infrastructure-as-Code tools, such as Docker and Docker Compose, play a crucial role in the development and orchestration of cloud-native and at-scale software. However, as IaC relies mostly on the development of text-only specifications, these are prone to misconfigurations and hard to debug. Several works suggest the use of models as a way to abstract their complexity, and some point to the use of visual metaphors. Yet, few empirical studies exist in this domain. We propose a visual programming notation and environment for specifying Docker Compose configurations and proceed to empirically validate its merits when compared with the standard text-only specification. The goal of this work is to produce evidence of the impact that visual approaches may have on the development of IaC. We observe that the use of our solution reduced the development time and error proneness, primarily for configurations definition activities. We also observed a preference for the approach in terms of ease of use, a positive sentiment of its usefulness and intention to use. © 2020 ACM.

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific