Views provided by UsageCounts
Q&A forums are today a valuable tool to assist developers in programming tasks. Unfortunately, contributions to these forums are often unclear and incomplete. Docker is a container solution that enables software developers to encapsulate an operating environment and could help address reproducibility issues. This paper reports on a feasibility study to evaluate if Docker can help improve reproducibility in Stack Overflow. We started surveying Stack Overflow users to understand their perceptions on the proposal of using Docker to reproduce Stack Overflow posts. Participants were critical and mentioned two important aspects: cost and need. To validate their criticism, we conducted an exploratory study focused on understanding how costly the task of creating containers for posts is for developers. Overall, results indicate that the cost of creating containers is not high, especially due to the fact that dockerfiles are highly similar and small. Based on these findings we developed a tool, dubbed FRISK, to assist developers in creating containers for those posts. We then conducted a user study to evaluate interest of Stack Overflow developers on the tool. We found that, on average, users spent nearly ten minutes interacting with FRISK and that 45.3% of the 563 FRISK sessions we created for existing posts resulted in a successful access to the corresponding web service by the owners of the post. Overall, this paper provides early evidence that the use of Docker in Q&A forums should be encouraged for configuration-related posts.
Stack Overflow, reproducibility, docker
Stack Overflow, reproducibility, docker
| selected citations These citations are derived from selected sources. This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically). | 0 | |
| popularity This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network. | Average | |
| influence This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically). | Average | |
| impulse This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network. | Average |
| views | 2 |

Views provided by UsageCounts