Modern software development incorporates various technologies, such as containerization, CI/CD pipelines, and build tools, which have to be jointly configured to enable building, testing, deployment, and execution of software systems. The vast configuration space spans several different configuration artifacts with their own syntax and semantics, encoding hundreds of configuration options and their values. The interplay of these technologies requires some level of coordination, which is realized by matching configurations. That is, configuration options and their according values may depend on other options and values from entirely different technologies and artifacts. This creates non-obvious configuration dependencies that are hard to track. The missing awareness and overview of such configuration dependencies across diverse configuration artifacts, tools, and frameworks can lead to dependency conflicts and severe configuration errors. We proposeCFGNET, a framework that models the configuration landscape of a software project as a configuration network in an extensible and artifact-independent way. This way, we enable the early detection of possible dependency violations and proactively prevent misconfigurations during software development and maintenance. In a literature study, we found that the most common form of dependencies is the equality of values of different options. Based on this result, we developed an equality-based linker to determine dependent options across different artifacts. To demonstrate the extensibility of our framework, we also implemented nine plugins for popular technologies, such as Maven and Docker. To evaluate our approach, we injected and violated five real-world configuration dependencies extracted from Stack Overflow, which we support with our technology plugins, in five subject systems.CFGNETfound all injected dependency violations and four additional ones already present in these systems. Moreover, we appliedCFGNETto the commit history of 50 repositories selected from GitHub and found dependency conflicts in about two thirds of these repositories. We manually inspected 883 conflicts, with about 89 % true positives, demonstrating the need to reliably track cross-technology configuration dependencies and prevent their misconfiguration.

With the rise of containerization, cloud development, and continuous integration and delivery, configuration has become an essential aspect not only to tailor software to user requirements, but also to configure a software system’s environment and infrastructure. This heterogeneity of activities, domains, and processes blurs the term configuration, as it is not clear anymore what tasks, artifacts, or stakeholders are involved and intertwined. However, each re- search study and each paper involving configuration places their contributions and findings in a certain context without making the context explicit. This makes it difficult to compare findings, translate them to practice, and to generalize the results. Thus, we set out to evaluate whether these different views on configuration are really distinct or can be summarized under a common umbrella. By interviewing practitioners from different domains and in different roles about the aspects of configuration and by analyzing two qualitative studies in similar areas, we derive a model of configuration that provides terminology and context for research studies, identifies new research opportunities, and allows practitioners to spot possible challenges in their current tasks. Although our interviewees have a clear view about configuration, it substantially differs due to their personal experience and role. This indicates that the term configuration might be overloaded. However, when taking a closer look, we see the interconnections and dependencies among all views, arriving at the conclusion that we need to start considering the entire spectrum of dimensions of configuration.