How Good Is Your Puppet?

How Good Is Your Puppet?: An Empirically Defined and Validated Quality Model for Puppet

Van der Bent, Eduard (Universiteit Utrecht)
Hage, Jurriaan (Universiteit Utrecht)
Visser, Joost (Software Improvement Group)
Gousios, G. (TU Delft Software Engineering)

2018-03

Puppet is a declarative language for configuration management that has rapidly gained popularity in recent years. Numerous organizations now rely on Puppet code for deploying their software systems onto cloud infrastructures. In this paper we provide a definition of code quality for Puppet code and an automated technique for measuring and rating Puppet code quality. To this end, we first explore the notion of code quality as it applies to Puppet code by performing a survey among Puppet developers. Second, we develop a measurement model for the maintainability aspect of Puppet code quality. To arrive at this measurement model, we derive appropriate quality metrics from our survey results and from existing software quality models. We implemented the Puppet code quality model in a software analysis tool. We validate our definition of Puppet code quality and the measurement model by a structured interview with Puppet experts and by comparing the tool results with quality judgments of those experts. The validation shows that the measurement model and tool provide quality judgments of Puppet code that closely match the judgments of experts. Also, the experts deem the model appropriate and usable in practice. The Software Improvement Group (SIG) has started using the model in its consultancy practice.

Measurement
Computer languages
Tools
Computational modeling
Sociology
Statistics
Software

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:0f664a13-a4af-4ea4-b230-e69d7bf8f93d

https://doi.org/10.1109/SANER.2018.8330206

IEEE, Piscataway, NJ

978-1-5386-4969-5

Proceedings - 25th IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering, SANER 2018

SANER 2018, 2018-02-20 → 2018-02-23, Campobasso, Italy

Institutional Repository

conference paper

© 2018 Eduard Van der Bent, Jurriaan Hage, Joost Visser, G. Gousios