Library Migration: A Retrospective Analysis and Tool

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dc.contributor.advisorWalker, Robert J.
dc.contributor.advisorRuhe, Günther
dc.contributor.authorZaidi, Syed Sajjad Hussain
dc.contributor.committeememberDenzinger, Jörg
dc.contributor.committeememberAycock, John Daniel
dc.date2019-06
dc.date.accessioned2019-03-21T18:58:39Z
dc.date.available2019-03-21T18:58:39Z
dc.date.issued2019-03-18
dc.description.abstractModern software engineering practices advocate the principle of reuse through third-party software libraries. Software libraries offer application programming interfaces (APIs) for use by developers, thereby significantly reducing development cost and time. These libraries are however subject to deprecation, vulnerabilities, and instability. Furthermore, as the product matures, developers have to worry about upgrading and migrating to better alternatives in order to attract and retain clients. Refactoring a system to start using a new library can cause a domino effect resulting in serious damage to the software system. Little is currently known about library migration; the few existing studies are either too preliminary or too problematic to tell us much. We perform an empirical study of 114 open source Java-based software systems in which library migration had occurred. We find that library migration leads to significant compatibility issues and breakage of source code in practice: library migration broke 67% of the software projects in which it occurred, while 22% of the transitively dependent projects broke due to coupling of APIs with external dependencies. Developers do not effectively use available resources to notify their clients about such migrations, preferring to use internal GitHub threads in contrast to the release notes, and even then often failing to discuss or announce the fact that library migration is planned or has been performed. We also found that mitigating library migration requires substantial effort by developers: on average, transformations affected 9.3% of the total classes in the dependent system, while impacting 15% of the total lines of code. We propose a systematic recommendation tool to assist developers in migrating or upgrading to a new software library. Our prototype tool, named EDW (for External Dependency Watcher), can be utilized to estimate and predict impacts while mitigating migrations among third-party libraries. We evaluate EDW by detecting the impacts of migration across three granularities in ten distinct open source projects: our tool has perfect precision for all three granularities; for recall, it obtained over 0.99 for class- and field-granularity while achieving 0.86 for method-granularity. We conduct a controlled experiment on EDW: human participants were able to perform the tasks in significantly less time and with better precision/recall using EDW as compared to JRipples.en_US
dc.identifier.citationZaidi, S. S. H. (2019). Library Migration: A Retrospective Analysis and Tool (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.en_US
dc.identifier.doihttp://dx.doi.org/10.11575/PRISM/36310
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/1880/110093
dc.language.isoenen_US
dc.publisher.facultyScienceen_US
dc.publisher.institutionUniversity of Calgaryen
dc.rightsUniversity of Calgary graduate students retain copyright ownership and moral rights for their thesis. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission.en_US
dc.subjectSoftware Engineeringen_US
dc.subject.classificationComputer Scienceen_US
dc.titleLibrary Migration: A Retrospective Analysis and Toolen_US
dc.typemaster thesisen_US
thesis.degree.disciplineComputer Scienceen_US
thesis.degree.grantorUniversity of Calgaryen_US
thesis.degree.nameMaster of Science (MSc)en_US
ucalgary.item.requestcopytrue
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