Using docker containers to improve reproducibility in software engineering research

Abstract

The ability to replicate and reproduce scientific results has become an increasingly important topic for many academic disciplines. In computer science and, more specifically, software engineering, contributions of scientific work rely on developed algorithms, tools and prototypes, quantitative evaluations, and other computational analyses. Published code and data come with many undocumented assumptions, dependencies, and configurations that are internal knowledge and make reproducibility hard to achieve. This technical briefing presents how Docker containers can overcome these issues and aid the reproducibility of research artifacts in software engineering and discusses their applications in the field.