Towards a Catalogue of Software Quality Metrics for Infrastructure Code

TL;DR

This paper introduces a catalogue of 46 metrics specifically designed for analyzing infrastructure-as-code scripts, focusing on Ansible, to improve understanding and maintenance of IaC quality.

Contribution

It presents the first comprehensive set of metrics tailored for IaC, particularly for Ansible, addressing the gap in domain-specific quality measurement tools.

Findings

Catalogue of 46 IaC metrics proposed

Metrics tailored for Ansible scripts analyzed

Facilitates better maintenance and evolution of IaC

Abstract

Infrastructure-as-code (IaC) is a practice to implement continuous deployment by allowing management and provisioning of infrastructure through the definition of machine-readable files and automation around them, rather than physical hardware configuration or interactive configuration tools. On the one hand, although IaC represents an ever-increasing widely adopted practice nowadays, still little is known concerning how to best maintain, speedily evolve, and continuously improve the code behind the IaC practice in a measurable fashion. On the other hand, source code measurements are often computed and analyzed to evaluate the different quality aspects of the software developed. However, unlike general-purpose programming languages (GPLs), IaC scripts use domain-specific languages, and metrics used for GPLs may not be applicable for IaC scripts. This article proposes a catalogue consisting of 46 metrics to identify IaC properties focusing on Ansible, one of the most popular IaC language to date, and shows how they can be used to analyze IaC scripts.