Using Docker to Assist Question and Answers Forum Users

Q&A forums are today a valuable tool to assist developers in programming tasks. Unfortunately, contributions to these forums are often unclear and incomplete. Docker is a container solution that enables software developers to encapsulate an operating environment and could help address reproducibility issues. This paper reports on a feasibility study to evaluate if Docker can help improve reproducibility in Stack Overflow. We started surveying Stack Overflow users to understand their perceptions on the proposal of using Docker to reproduce Stack Overflow posts. Participants were critical and mentioned two important aspects: cost and need. To validate their criticism, we conducted an exploratory study focused on understanding how costly the task of creating containers for posts is for developers. Overall, results indicate that the cost of creating containers is not high, especially due to the fact that dockerfiles are highly similar and small. Based on these findings we developed a tool, dubbed FRISK, to assist developers in creating containers for those posts. We then conducted a user study to evaluate interest of Stack Overflow developers on the tool. We found that, on average, users spent nearly ten minutes interacting with FRISK and that 45.3% of the 563 FRISK sessions we created for existing posts resulted in a successful access to the corresponding web service by the owners of the post. Overall, this paper provides early evidence that the use of Docker in Q&A forums should be encouraged for configuration-related posts.