2026-10-05T21:32:55Z https://drops.dagstuhl.de/oai

oai:drops-oai.dagstuhl.de:28007 2026-10-05T06:44:04Z ddc:004 open_access

A Catalog of Transformations to Remove Dockerfile Smells Barros, Eduardo Ribeiro, Márcio Pontillo, Valeria Martins, Luana Palomba, Fabio Fonseca, Baldoino Gheyi, Rohit Machado, Ivan Docker Dockerfile Refactoring Catalog Transformation Quality Background. Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) has become a standard in software deployment, with Dockerfiles among its most prevalent formats. However, Dockerfiles often exhibit Dockerfile smells, violations of best practices that can harm reproducibility, build time, image size, and security. Although prior work has proposed detectors, fixes, and refactoring catalogs, existing knowledge remains mostly descriptive or illustrative, lacking explicit transformation rules with source and target structures, and applicability conditions intended to support behavior-preserving application. Aims. This work aims to provide a catalog of formalized transformation rules for removing Dockerfile smells and to evaluate how practitioners perceive the resulting Dockerfile. Method. We formalized rules for a set of ten Dockerfile transformations and conducted a mixed-method empirical study with 59 participants: 39 survey respondents and 20 interviewees from industry and academia with varied levels of Docker experience. Results. Participants generally preferred the resulting Dockerfiles, which achieved an overall mean acceptance rate of 76%. Nine rules were accepted by a majority of participants, with the highest acceptance rate reaching 95%. Participants favored transformations that improved stability, security, and build time, but were less favorable toward transformations that reduced readability or made debugging harder. Conclusions. Our findings suggest that formalized Dockerfile transformations are a promising basis for refactoring support, but their adoption depends on balancing technical quality improvements with developers’ practical expectations. Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik Eduardo Barros and Márcio Ribeiro and Valeria Pontillo and Luana Martins and Fabio Palomba and Baldoino Fonseca and Rohit Gheyi and Ivan Machado 2026 Is Part Of LIPIcs, Volume 394, 20th International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM 2026) InProceedings Text doc-type:ResearchArticle publishedVersion application/pdf doi:10.4230/LIPIcs.ESEM.2026.39 urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-280070 https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ESEM.2026.39 eng https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode