Giving back: Contributions congruent to library dependency changes in a software ecosystem
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...
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2023
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sg-smu-ink.sis_research-97932024-05-30T08:51:34Z Giving back: Contributions congruent to library dependency changes in a software ecosystem WATTANAKRIENGKRAI, Supatsara WANG, Dong KULA, Raula Gaikovina TREUDE, Christoph THONGTANUNAM, Patanamon ISHIO, Takashi MATSUMOTO, Kenichi 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. 2023-04-01T07:00:00Z text application/pdf https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/8790 info:doi/10.1109/TSE.2022.3225197 https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/9793/viewcontent/Giving_Back_Contributions_Congruent_to_Library_Dependency_Changes_in_a_Software_Ecosystem.pdf http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems eng Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University Software Ecosystem Dependency Changes NPM ecosystem Software Engineering |
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Software Ecosystem Dependency Changes NPM ecosystem Software Engineering WATTANAKRIENGKRAI, Supatsara WANG, Dong KULA, Raula Gaikovina TREUDE, Christoph THONGTANUNAM, Patanamon ISHIO, Takashi MATSUMOTO, Kenichi Giving back: Contributions congruent to library dependency changes in a software ecosystem |
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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. |
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text |
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WATTANAKRIENGKRAI, Supatsara WANG, Dong KULA, Raula Gaikovina TREUDE, Christoph THONGTANUNAM, Patanamon ISHIO, Takashi MATSUMOTO, Kenichi |
author_facet |
WATTANAKRIENGKRAI, Supatsara WANG, Dong KULA, Raula Gaikovina TREUDE, Christoph THONGTANUNAM, Patanamon ISHIO, Takashi MATSUMOTO, Kenichi |
author_sort |
WATTANAKRIENGKRAI, Supatsara |
title |
Giving back: Contributions congruent to library dependency changes in a software ecosystem |
title_short |
Giving back: Contributions congruent to library dependency changes in a software ecosystem |
title_full |
Giving back: Contributions congruent to library dependency changes in a software ecosystem |
title_fullStr |
Giving back: Contributions congruent to library dependency changes in a software ecosystem |
title_full_unstemmed |
Giving back: Contributions congruent to library dependency changes in a software ecosystem |
title_sort |
giving back: contributions congruent to library dependency changes in a software ecosystem |
publisher |
Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University |
publishDate |
2023 |
url |
https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/8790 https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/9793/viewcontent/Giving_Back_Contributions_Congruent_to_Library_Dependency_Changes_in_a_Software_Ecosystem.pdf |
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1814047530915201024 |