Visual Notations in Container Orchestrations: An Empirical Study with Docker Compose

TL;DR

This study introduces a visual notation tool for Docker Compose configurations, demonstrating through empirical evaluation that it reduces development effort, errors, and improves usability for novice developers.

Contribution

It presents a novel visual notation tool for container orchestration with empirical evidence of its effectiveness and usability improvements.

Findings

Significant reduction in development time

Lower error rates in configuration tasks

Positive user feedback on usability

Abstract

Context: Container orchestration tools supporting infrastructure-as-code allow new forms of collaboration between developers and operatives. Still, their text-based nature permits naive mistakes and is more difficult to read as complexity increases. We can find few examples of low-code approaches for defining the orchestration of containers, and there seems to be a lack of empirical studies showing the benefits and limitations of such approaches. Goal & method: We hypothesize that a complete visual notation for Docker-based orchestrations could reduce the effort, the error rate, and the development time. Therefore, we developed a tool featuring such a visual notation for Docker Compose configurations, and we empirically evaluated it in a controlled experiment with novice developers. Results: The results show a significant reduction in development time and error-proneness when defining Docker Compose files, supporting our hypothesis. The participants also thought the prototype easier to use and useful, and wanted to use it in the future.