1 research outputs found
Quality Assessment and Improvement of Helm Charts for Kubernetes-Based Cloud Applications
Helm has recently been proposed by practitioners as technology to package and
deploy complex software applications on top of Kubernetes-based cloud computing
platforms. Despite growing popularity, little is known about the individual
so-called Helm Charts and about the emerging ecosystem of charts around the
KubeApps Hub website and decentralised charts repositories. This article
contributes first quantified insights around both the charts and the artefact
development community based on metrics automatically gathered by a proposed
quality assessment tool named HelmQA. The work further identifies quality
insufficiencies detectable in public charts, proposes a developer-centric
hypothesis-based methodology to systematically improve the quality by using
HelmQA, and finally empirically attempts to validate the methodology and thus
the practical usefulness of the tool by presenting results of its application
over a representative four-month period. Although one of our initial hypotheses
does not statistically hold during the experiment, we still infer that using
HelmQA regularly in continuous software development would lead to reduced
quality issues.Comment: 19 pages, 11 figures, 9 tables, repeatable, preregistered, unreviewe