Measuring Configuration in Code - Risk Assessment and Metrics

Explore the critical importance of measuring configuration in code through this 19-minute conference talk from ACM SIGPLAN's CONFLANG23. Delve into the growing issue of outages caused by simple configuration changes and the need for more rigorous testing and review processes. Discover how to assess the true complexity and impact of configuration changes by examining intermediate and terminal usages of configuration values. Learn about innovative approaches to propagate code complexity and coverage metrics up the call stack, aggregating them at the configuration level. Gain insights into computing test coverage for configuration based on aggregate usage and explore various code metrics that can be applied to configuration. Understand how these techniques can help elucidate risks, highlight troublesome areas in your codebase, and expedite recovery from configuration-related issues.