David Spielmann
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Spielmann
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David
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david.spielmann@unisg.ch
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+41 71 224 32 75

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  • Publication
    The PIPr Dataset of Public Infrastructure as Code Programs
    ( 2024)
    Sokolowski, Daniel orcid-logo
    ;
    Spielmann, David
    ;
    Salvaneschi, Guido
    ;
    The
    With Programming Languages Infrastructure as Code (PL-IaC), developers implement IaC programs in popular imperative programming languages like Python and Typescript. Such programs generate the declarative target state of the deployment, i.e., they describe what to set up, not how to set it up. Despite the popularity of PL-IaC, which has grown more than ten times from 2020 to 2023, we know little about how developers apply it and how IaC programs differ from other software. Such knowledge is essential to effectively use existing software engineering techniques and develop new ones for PL-IaC. To shed light on PL-IaC in practice, we present PIPr, the first systematic PL-IaC dataset. PIPr is based on 37 712 public IaC programs on GitHub from August 2022 and includes initial analyses, assessing the programming languages, testing techniques, and licenses of the IaC programs. Beyond the metadata and analysis results of all IaC programs, PIPr contains the code of all 15 504 IaC programs whose licenses permit redistribution. PIPr sets the ground for future in-depth investigations on PL-IaC in practice.
    Type: conference paper
    DOI: 10.1145/3643991.3644888
    URI: https://www.alexandria.unisg.ch/handle/20.500.14171/120131
    Scopus© Citations 2
  • Publication
    Unleashing the Giants: Enabling Advanced Testing for Infrastructure as Code
    ( 2024)
    Daniel Sokolowski orcid-logo
    ;
    David Spielmann
    ;
    Guido Salvaneschi
    Infrastructure as Code (IaC) programs are written in imperative programming languages like Python or TypeScript while declaratively defining the target state of software deployments, which the IaC solution then sets up, e.g., Pulumi and AWS CDK. Through a repository mining study and analysis, we noticed that testing IaC programs poses a dilemma: current techniques are either slow and expensive or require prohibitively high development effort. To solve this issue, we introduce Automated Configuration Testing (ACT), enabling efficient testing with low development effort. ACT automates the tedious aspects of unit testing IaC programs and is extensible through a plugin system for test generators and oracles. ACT is already effective with simple type-based plugins, and leveraging existing giants, i.e., advanced test generation and oracle techniques, in new plugins will further boost its effectiveness.
    Type: conference poster
    DOI: 10.1145/3639478.3643078
    URI: https://www.alexandria.unisg.ch/handle/20.500.14171/120130
  • Publication
    Automated Infrastructure as Code Program Testing
    ( 2024)
    Sokolowski, Daniel orcid-logo
    ;
    Spielmann, David
    ;
    Automated, "
    Infrastructure as Code (IaC) enables efficient deployment and operation, which are crucial to releasing software quickly. As setups can be complex, developers implement IaC programs in general-purpose programming languages like TypeScript and Python, using PL-IaC solutions like Pulumi and AWS CDK. The reliability of such IaC programs is even more relevant than in traditional software because a bug in IaC impacts the whole system. Yet, even though testing is a standard development practice, it is rarely used for IaC programs. For instance, in August 2022, less than 1 % of the public Pulumi IaC programs on GitHub implemented tests. Available IaC program testing techniques severely limit the development velocity or require much development effort. To solve these issues, we propose Automated Configuration Testing (ACT), a methodology to test IaC programs in many configurations quickly and with low effort. ACT automatically mocks all resource definitions in the IaC program and uses generator and oracle plugins for test generation and validation. We implement ACT in ProTI, a testing tool for Pulumi TypeScript with a type-based generator and oracle, and support for application specifications. Our evaluation with 6 081 programs from GitHub and artificial benchmarks shows that ProTI can directly be applied to existing IaC programs, quickly finds bugs where current techniques are infeasible, and enables reusing existing generators and oracles thanks to its pluggable architecture.
    Type: journal-article
    Journal: IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
    DOI: 10.1109/TSE.2024.3393070
    URI: https://www.alexandria.unisg.ch/handle/20.500.14171/120132