Software architecture is reflected across multiple artifacts, making it difficult to communicate without proper documentation, which often becomes outdated or unreliable. We propose an approach to support Living Documentation by generating architectural diagrams from Docker Compose files. We implement our approach as a prototype tool that we name Infragenie and conduct an empirical study to show the viability of the approach. The study involved sending questionnaires to maintainers of 378 GitHub repositories. We received 36 responses. Infragenie-generated diagrams were rated as better or much better for most of the 12 projects with previous diagrams. Over 70% of the respondents agreed that our approach was able to improve documentation completeness, consistency, and accessibility, and more than 90% recognized its effectiveness in capturing key architectural elements. We conclude that by using Docker Compose files we were able to provide useful architectural diagrams.

Note: The video of the tool is made available as part of our experimental package (see Section 3) but, for review purposes, also at the Web address: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bcoHcxo9AIztMx6oSUdPEZT3XF0B4OJ1/view