A Study of Bugs Found in the Puppet Configuration Management System

Bachelor thesis (2022)

Authors

M. Krupauskas Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Contributors

D. Spinellis Software Engineering - EEMCS (mentor)
Thodoris Sotiropoulos Athens University of Economics and Business (mentor)
F. Broz Interactive Intelligence - EEMCS (graduation committee member)
Faculty
Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
Copyright: © 2022 Mykolas Krupauskas
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Published Date

22-06-2022

Language

English

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Faculty

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Abstract

This research studies the symptoms, root causes, impact, triggers, fixes, and system dependency of bugs in the Puppet configuration management system. Puppet is a widely used open-source configuration management system that performs various administrative tasks on machines based on a central specification. This paper aims to fill the research gap and help improve the understanding of these systems. 2146 registered bugs and fixes are collected and a random sample of 100 is analyzed to answer the research questions. The most common bug types have the symptom of unexpected runtime behavior. The root cause is generally incorrect target machine operations. The impact severity is typically medium and the impact consequence of most bugs is target configuration failure. Bug fixes tend to be small method code changes and usually occur in the execution component. Bugs are generally system-independent and are caused by logic errors that can be triggered by specifically executing an erroneous module. The analysis shows that applying automated bug discovery methods to the most error-prone execution and parser components of the system would lead to the largest improvement in the system’s quality.