Semantic versioning and impact of breaking changes in the Maven repository

Systems that depend on third-party libraries may have to be updated when updates to these libraries become available in order to benefit from new functionality, security patches, bug fixes, or API improvements. However, often such changes come with changes to the existing interfaces of these libraries, possibly causing rework on the client...

Testing principles, current practices, and effects of change localization

Measuring Library Stability Through Historical Version Analysis

Backward compatibility is a major concern for any library developer. In this paper, we evaluate how stable a set of frequently used third-party libraries is in terms of method removals, implementation change, the ratio of change in old methods to change in new ones and the percentage of new methods in each snapshot. We provide a motivating...