Does the release cycle of a library project influence when it is adopted by a client project?

Fujibayashi, Daiki; Ihara, Akinori; Suwa, Hirohiko; Kula, Raula Gaikovina; Matsumoto, Kenichi

doi:10.1109/saner.2017.7884681

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 4 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Bavota et al [11,12] analyzed when and why developers updated inter-dependencies, and they found that a high number of bug fixes could encourage dependency updates, and API changes could discourage dependency updates. Fujibayashi et al [30] studied the relationship between library release cycle and library version updates. Kula et al [43] analyzed the practice of library updates, and found that developers rarely updated libraries.…”

Section: Update Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

An Empirical Study of Usages, Updates and Risks of Third-Party Libraries in Java Projects

Wang¹,

Chen²,

Huang³

et al. 2020

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Third-party libraries are a central building block to develop software systems. However, outdated third-party libraries are commonly used, and developers are usually less aware of the potential risks. Therefore, a quantitative and holistic study on usages, updates and risks of third-party libraries can provide practical insights to improve the ecosystem sustainably. In this paper, we conduct such a study in the Java ecosystem. Specifically, we conduct a library usage analysis (e.g., usage intensity and outdatedness) and a library update analysis (e.g., update intensity and delay) using 806 open-source projects. The two analyses aim to quantify usage and update practices holistically from the perspective of both opensource projects and third-party libraries. Then, we conduct a library risk analysis (e.g., potential risk and developer response) in terms of bugs with 15 popularly-used third-party libraries. This analysis aims to quantify the potential risk of using outdated libraries and the developer response to the risk. Our findings from the three analyses provide practical insights to developers and researchers on problems and potential solutions in maintaining third-party libraries (e.g., smart alerting and automated updating of outdated libraries). To demonstrate the usefulness of our findings, we propose a bug-driven alerting system for assisting developers to make confident decisions in updating third-party library versions. We have released our dataset to foster valuable applications and improve the ecosystem.

show abstract

Section: Update Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%