Academic Journal
Giving Back: Contributions Congruent to Library Dependency Changes in a Software Ecosystem
| العنوان: | Giving Back: Contributions Congruent to Library Dependency Changes in a Software Ecosystem |
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| المؤلفون: | Wattanakriengkrai, S., Wang, D., Kula, R.G., Treude, C., Thongtanunam, P., Ishio, T., Matsumoto, K. |
| المصدر: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/tse.2022.3225197. |
| بيانات النشر: | Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) |
| سنة النشر: | 2023 |
| المجموعة: | The University of Adelaide: Digital Library |
| مصطلحات موضوعية: | Software ecosystem, dependency changes, npm ecosystem |
| الوصف: | The widespread adoption of third-party libraries for contemporary software development has led to the creation of large inter-dependency networks, where sustainability issues of a single library can have widespread network effects. Maintainers of these libraries are often overworked, relying on the contributions of volunteers to sustain these libraries. To understand these contributions, in this work, we leverage socio-technical techniques to introduce and formalise dependency-contribution congruence (DC congruence) at both ecosystem and library level, i.e., to understand the degree and origins of contributions congruent to dependency changes, analyze whether they contribute to library dormancy (i.e., a lack of activity), and investigate similarities between these congruent contributions compared to typical contributions. We conduct a large-scale empirical study to measure the DC congruence for the npm ecosystem using 1.7 million issues, 970 thousand pull requests (PRs), and over 5.3 million commits belonging to 107,242 npm libraries. We find that the most congruent contributions originate from contributors who can only submit (not commit) to both a client and a library. At the project level, we find that DC congruence shares an inverse relationship with the likelihood that a library becomes dormant. Specifically, a library is less likely to become dormant if the contributions are congruent with upgrading dependencies. Finally, by comparing the source code of contributions, we find statistical differences in the file path and added lines in the source code of congruent contributions when compared to typical contributions. Our work has implications to encourage dependency contributions, especially to support library maintainers in sustaining their projects. ; Supatsara Wattanakriengkrai, Dong Wang, Raula Gaikovina Kula, Christoph Treude, Patanamon Thongtanunam, Takashi Ishio, and Kenichi Matsumoto |
| نوع الوثيقة: | article in journal/newspaper |
| وصف الملف: | application/pdf |
| اللغة: | English |
| تدمد: | 0098-5589 1939-3520 |
| Relation: | http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/DE210101091; IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 2023; 49(4):1-13; https://hdl.handle.net/2440/138678; Treude, C. [0000-0002-6919-2149] |
| DOI: | 10.1109/TSE.2022.3225197 |
| الاتاحة: | https://hdl.handle.net/2440/138678 https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2022.3225197 |
| Rights: | This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
| رقم الانضمام: | edsbas.AA4A2618 |
| قاعدة البيانات: | BASE |
| تدمد: | 00985589 19393520 |
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| DOI: | 10.1109/TSE.2022.3225197 |