An HCI View of Configuration Problems

Abstract: In recent years, configuration problems have drawn tremendous attention because of their increasing prevalence and their big impact on system availability. We believe that many of these problems are attributable to today's configuration interfaces that have not evolved to accommodate the enormous shift of the system administrator group. Plain text files, as the de facto configuration interfaces, assume administrators' understanding of the system under configuration. They ask administrators to directly edit the corresponding entries with little guidance or assistance. However, this assumption no longer holds for todays administrator group which has expanded greatly to include non- and semi-professional administrators. In this paper, we provide an HCI view of today's configuration problems, and articulate system configuration as a new HCI problem. Moreover, we present the top obstacles to correctly and efficiently configuring software systems, and most importantly their implications on the design and implementation of new-generation configuration interfaces.