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A formal framework for measuring technical lag in component repositories — and its application to npm
Author(s) -
Zerouali Ahmed,
Mens Tom,
GonzalezBarahona Jesus,
Decan Alexandre,
Constantinou Eleni,
Robles Gregorio
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
journal of software: evolution and process
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.371
H-Index - 29
eISSN - 2047-7481
pISSN - 2047-7473
DOI - 10.1002/smr.2157
Subject(s) - computer science , software engineering , software deployment , component (thermodynamics) , software , transitive relation , lag , database , programming language , operating system , physics , combinatorics , thermodynamics , mathematics
Reusable Open Source Software (OSS) components for major programming languages are available in package repositories. Developers rely on package management tools to automate deployments, specifying which package releases satisfy the needs of their applications. However, these specifications may lead to deploying package releases that are outdated, or otherwise undesirable, because they do not include bug fixes, security fixes, or new functionality. In contrast, automatically updating to a more recent release may introduce incompatibility issues. To capture this delicate balance, we formalise a generic model of technical lag , a concept that quantifies to which extent a deployed collection of components is outdated, with respect to the ideal deployment. We operationalise this model for the npm package manager. We empirically analyze the history of package update practices and technical lag for more than 500 K packages with about 4 M package releases over a seven‐year period. We consider both development and runtime dependencies, and study both direct and transitive dependencies. We also analyze the technical lag of external GitHub applications depending on npm packages. We report our findings, suggesting the need for more awareness of, and integrated tool support for, controlling technical lag in software libraries.