Configuration File Handling with Puppet: a Software Experiment

The goal of this user study or software experiment is to outline differences between Puppet strategy for manipulating configuration files. Therefore this study compares six different methods for writing or modifying configuration files, from very general to very specific methods.

This study consists of five tasks, whereas all tasks will be solved several times, each with a different Puppet method. The five tasks can be classified in 3 main groups:

• writing a complete configuration file at once
• partial configuration file manipulations
• maintenance tasks: bug fixing, adding features

Experiment Setup Requirements

The user study setup consist of a set of Docker container. Therefore first ensure you have a recent Docker version installed and your account is able to access the Docker daemon. The used text editor is running inside a Docker container too, which requires access to your X-Display.

The experiment setup was tested on the following installations:

• Ubuntu 16.04 (development environment)
• Ubuntu 14.04
• Arch Linux (latest, April 2017)
• Debian 8
• CentOS 7 (might require applying the tools/atom-allow-x0-access.pp selinux policy)
• above installations through ssh X11 forwarding (requires fast connection)

How to Start

• Clone this repo
• start the tools/expctr.py tool
• run pull_images: this will pull all required Docker images from Dockerhub
• read the task instructions task_descriptions.md

Approximately study duration: 4.5h without prior Puppet knowledge, with good Puppet experience about 2.5h.

If you have finished the study, export the results with the command finished and send me the resulting tarball.

Final Submissions

The study runs until May 15. and the results will be published on May 21.

The results of this user study can be found at https://github.com/ElektraInitiative/puppet-userstudy-results