A study of bugs found in the Ansible configuration management system
M. Rastenis (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
Thodoris Sotiropoulos – Mentor (Athens University of Economics and Business)
D. Spinellis – Mentor (TU Delft - Software Engineering)
F. Broz – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Interactive Intelligence)
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Abstract
Research that focuses on examining software bugs is critical when developing tools for preventing and for fixing software issues. Previous work in this area has explored other types of systems, such as bugs of compilers and security issues stemming from open source systems hosted on public repositories. This paper explores the bugs within the Ansible software provisioning and configuration management system. The main question this paper seeks to answer is "What common patterns can be extracted from the bugs found and what are the root causes, symptoms, triggers, system-dependence factors, fixes, and the impact of the most frequent types of bugs in the Ansible configuration management system". This study defines a data pipeline and custom tools to extract and analyze 100 Ansible bugs. Common classifications are determined, and the bugs are manually classified, revealing common patters within the bugs. Insights are drawn from the aggregated data, and recommendations are made for addressing bug-prone areas of execution and connectivity components, and expanding the test suite with input fuzzing and a genetic algorithms test solution, in order to improve the overall code quality of the Ansible code base.