The Evolution of the R Software Ecosystem

Germán, Daniel M.; Adams, Bram; Hassan, Ahmed E.

doi:10.1109/csmr.2013.33

Cited by 82 publications

(49 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…German et al [11] study packages in the R ecosystem. They find that most packages do not have any dependencies, but popular ones are more likely to have.…”

Section: B Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Structure and Evolution of Package Dependency Networks

Kikas

Gousios

Dumas

et al. 2017

2017 IEEE/ACM 14th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR)

141

129

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Abstract-Software developers often include available opensource software packages into their projects to minimize redundant effort. However, adding a package to a project can also introduce risks, which can propagate through multiple levels of dependencies. Currently, not much is known about the structure of open-source package ecosystems of popular programming languages and the extent to which transitive bug propagation is possible. This paper analyzes the dependency network structure and evolution of the JavaScript, Ruby, and Rust ecosystems. The reported results reveal significant differences across language ecosystems. The results indicate that the number of transitive dependencies for JavaScript has grown 60% over the last year, suggesting that developers should look more carefully into their dependencies to understand what exactly is included. The study also reveals that vulnerability to a removal of the most popular package is increasing, yet most other packages have a decreasing impact on vulnerability. The findings of this study can inform the development of dependency management tools.

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“…German et al [11] study packages in the R ecosystem. They find that most packages do not have any dependencies, but popular ones are more likely to have.…”

Section: B Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Structure and Evolution of Package Dependency Networks

Kikas

Gousios

Dumas

et al. 2017

2017 IEEE/ACM 14th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR)

141

129

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…There is a prevalence of certain channels over others, depending on the projects and the resources available to them, and because usually FOSS projects are developed by groups of people distributed across the globe. FOSS projects might use different communications channels, among them mailing lists and IRC are the most frequently used [21,23,25]. Mailing lists are used as public forums for asynchronous communication whereas IRC is used as instant messaging for synchronous communication.…”

Section: Social Aspects and Communication Channelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Herding cats in a FOSS ecosystem: a tale of communication and coordination for release management

Poo-Caamaño

Knauss

Singer

et al. 2017

J Internet Serv Appl

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Release management in large-scale software development projects requires significant communication and coordination. It is particularly challenging in Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) ecosystems, in which hundreds of loosely connected developers and their projects are coordinated to release software to a schedule. To better understand this process and its challenges, we analyzed over two and half years of communication in the GNOME ecosystem and studied developers' interactions. Through a case study, we cataloged communication channels, determined the main channel from which we categorized high level communication and coordination activities spanning five releases, and triangulated our results by interviewing ten key developers. We found that a release schedule, influence (instead of direct control), and diversity are the main factors that positively impact the release process in the GNOME ecosystem. We report a set of lessons learned that encapsulates our understanding of how the Release Management process function in a FOSS ecosystem, we learned that: (1) ensure that the release team follows the main communication channels used by developers, (2) provide a common place for coordination for an ecosystem, (3) consider including both good technical and social skills in a release team, (4) aim for a diverse release team, (5) based on lack of power, lobbying and consensus based management must be followed, (6) help the release team in the coordination process with a well defined schedule, and (7) release team work is different from regular software work. Our results can help organizations build better large-scale teams and show that research focused on individual projects might miss important parts of the picture.

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“…In particular, more fine-grained analysis of CRAN package dependencies and how these affect maintenance and update of packages is needed. Although some empirical studies of CRAN have been carried out [8], [9], we are not aware of any web-based applications aiming to provide sophisticated support for understanding and improving the maintenance of CRAN contributed packages.…”

Section: Related Work and Existing Toolsmentioning

confidence: 99%

maintaineR: A Web-Based Dashboard for Maintainers of CRAN Packages

Claes

Mens

Grosjean

2014

2014 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution

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The R development community maintains thousands of packages through its Comprehensive R Archive Network CRAN. The growth and evolution of this archive makes it more and more difficult to maintain packages and their interdependencies, and the existing tools that aim to help developers in this process no longer suffice. We propose maintaineR, a web-based dashboard that allows CRAN package developers to understand and deal with the implications and problems raised by package updates. The dashboard complements existing analysis tools by providing additional support such as the visualisation of package dependencies and reverse dependencies, package conflicts, crosspackage function clones, and so on.

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The Evolution of the R Software Ecosystem

Cited by 82 publications

References 20 publications

Structure and Evolution of Package Dependency Networks

Structure and Evolution of Package Dependency Networks

Herding cats in a FOSS ecosystem: a tale of communication and coordination for release management

maintaineR: A Web-Based Dashboard for Maintainers of CRAN Packages

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