A Framework for Measuring the Quality of Infrastructure-as-Code Scripts

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) has become integral to modern software development, enabling automated and consistent configuration of computing environments. The rapid proliferation of IaC scripts has highlighted the need for better code quality assessment methods. This paper proposes a new IaC code quality framework specifically showcased for Ansible repositories as a foundation. By analyzing a comprehensive dataset of repositories from Ansible Galaxy, we applied our framework to evaluate code quality across multiple attributes. The analysis of our code quality metrics applied to Ansible Galaxy repositories reveal trends over time indicating improvements in areas such as metadata and error handling, while highlighting declines in others such as sophistication and automation. The framework offers practitioners a systematic tool for assessing and enhancing IaC scripts, fostering standardization and facilitating continuous improvement. It also provides a standardized foundation for further work into IaC code quality.