Visual Notations in Container Orchestrations: An Empirical Study with Docker Compose

Context: Container orchestration tools supporting infrastructure-as-code allow new forms of collaboration between developers and operatives. Still, their text-based nature permits naive mistakes and is more difficult to read as complexity increases. We can find few examples of low-code approaches for defining the orchestration of containers, and there seems to be a lack of empirical studies showing the benefits and limitations of such approaches. Goal & method: We hypothesize that a complete visual notation for Docker-based orchestrations could reduce the effort, the error rate, and the development time. Therefore, we developed a tool featuring such a visual notation for Docker Compose configurations, and we empirically evaluated it in a controlled experiment with novice developers. Results: The results show a significant reduction in development time and error-proneness when defining Docker Compose files, supporting our hypothesis. The participants also thought the prototype easier to use and useful, and wanted to use it in the future.